Are the words “objective” and “objective truth” only used as “rhetorical moves”? Do they create “mischief in the whole debate”?
Jonathan Rée (1948-) is a British “freelance” philosopher and historian.
He has written for the London Review of Books, The Independent, New Humanist, Evening Standard, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Lingua Franca, Prospect and The Times Literary Supplement. In the1990s, Rée presented the Channel 4 TV series Talking Liberties, which featured conversations with the philosophers Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida and the historian Edward Said.
Rée was a joint founder of the journal, Radical Philosophy.
All the quotes from Rée in the following come from an interview with Jeremy Stangroom, which was published in the book What Philosophers Think. (A separate version of that interview can be found here.)
Introduction
Jonathan Rée has a problem with the word “objective” — particularly when it’s used in the context of the often-used phrase “objective truth”.
Like Frank Ramsey (1903–1930) before him in the case of the words “is true” in the statement “p is true” (see Ramsey here and the more general ‘The Redundancy Theory of Truth’), Rée believes that the addition of the word “objective” doesn’t add anything to any statement which is deemed to be true.
As Rée himself puts it:
“I mean it’s ludicrous to think that adding the word ‘objective’ makes a truth any more true. There is a very important distinction between propositions that are true and propositions that are false. But I don’t know what further distinction is intended by adding the word ‘objective’. It is simply a rhetorical move that does mischief to the whole debate.”
So what does the word “objectively” in the statement “… is objectively true” add to that statement?
Is it about the impartiality of the statement itself or perhaps about the impartiality of the speaker who asserts it?
Is statement S objective because it’s about objects (or facts). Or is S objective simply because it’s not subjective (i.e., it’s not a “subjective truth”)? That is, isn’t a subjective truth about the speaker’s personal opinions, beliefs and emotions, rather than about hard matters of fact?
Now take these two metalanguage (or second-order) statements:
(1) The statement “Hitler died in 1945’” is true.
and
(2) The statement “Hitler died in 1945” is objectively true.
Is there a difference between (1) and (2)?
Perhaps the difference is that (1) and (2) are two different speech acts which each have a different illocutionary force. That said, perhaps (2) still doesn’t add anything factual or propositional to the embedded object statement “Hitler died in 1945” itself. However, it may still add something to the force of the speaker’s utterance.
Yet that illocutionary force, according to Rée, is simply a “rhetorical move”. And, if that’s the case, then perhaps it’s an attempt to stress that what the speaker is saying is true in an extra-special sense. That is, it’s more than true: it’s objectively true.
Rée also argues that the use of the word “objective” actually “does mischief to the whole debate”. Rée seems to believe that this is because the use of that word doesn’t actually get us anywhere or make the terms of the debate any clearer.
Despite all that, Rée does go on to make what seems to be a relativist point about truth when he states the following:
“What people need to understand is that the only truths that are available to us are those of specific historical contexts, but that they are no less true for that.”
Perhaps the operative words in the above are “available to us”. That is, this may be the epistemic point that we only have access to truths as they appear in “specific historical contexts”. Indeed the expressions of truth (if not truth itself) must appear in some context or other. In other words, truths don’t float free of the world and its specific historical or social contexts.
Could this be any other way?
After all, all truths are (as it were) given to us in the guise of particular contingent languages with their equally contingent words or concepts. And these languages — with their words or concepts — are bound to colour what it is that’s said in them. Thus no natural — or even artificial — language can break free of its many contexts and somehow describe the world (or its properties) in some kind of precise and perfect algorithmic manner.
Yet Rée also argues that even though truths are context-dependent (or context-relative), then it’s still the case that such truths are “no less true for that”. Indeed that’s the case because there’s no alternative but to recognise the social context (or context-sensitivity) of truth. In other words, if there are no (as it were) free-floating abstract truths, then such context-sensitivity can’t be avoided.
To repeat: Rée argues that just because truths are expressed in contingent languages (with their contingent words and concepts) and specific historical and social contexts, that doesn’t make them any less true.
Yet here’s a possible rejoinder to Rée.
Perhaps the various and many contingencies of natural — and even artificial — languages aren’t (as it were) passed on to the truths expressed in such languages. On the other hand, perhaps contingency is indeed transitive in these respects.
Rée then brings the American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931–2007) into this debate
Rée on Objectivity and Intersubjectivity
Rée endorses Richard Rorty’s view that we should really talk about “intersubjectivity”, rather than “objectivity” (see Rorty here). After all, if the word “objective” is little more than a (to use Rée's words again) “rhetorical move” when used in philosophical and everyday debates, then someone can always trump another person’s claim with his use of this (as it were) self-complimentary word.
So perhaps we should leave the word “objective” well alone.
Rée says:
“I think this is why Rorty, who is quite wise about this matter, says that you should talk about intersubjectivity rather than objectivity. The question is not about different realities and how they connect up, but different conceptions, different vocabularies, and how they connect up. What you need to do is to experiment with trying to have conversations with people and to see whether you can negotiate some kind of linkage between the way that you’re talking about things and the way that they do.”
Firstly, we can say that if the word “intersubjectivity” is taken as being little more than a synonym of the word “objectivity”, then there’s little point in substituting the former for the latter. Alternatively, perhaps intersubjectivity is something other than objectivity. Either that, or objectivity isn’t really something to be more than — or to be different to — if what Rée argued earlier is correct. (To repeat: the words “objectively true” amount to little more than a “rhetorical move” and an “empty compliment” paid to the speaker’s utterance or claim.)
For a start, intersubjectivity is at least partly about communal agreement and the different kinds of rules (both implicit and explicit) which are used within debates, research, theorising, etc. Objectivity, on the other hand, seems to be something a person can have (or claim to have) all on his own despite communal practices — or, more mundanely, despite what other people think.
To follow a Wittgensteinian line. (See the ‘Private language argument’.)
If knowledge-in-splendid-isolation makes little sense, then perhaps we can say the same about private objectivity. After all, doesn’t one need knowledge in order to have (or to claim) objectivity for an utterance or statement?
It’s also interesting that Rée doesn’t go as far as, say, Nelson Goodman (1906–1998) and his talk of “world-versions”.
World-Versions?
Rée argues that this debate isn’t about “different realities and how they connect up”. Instead, it’s about “different conceptions, different vocabularies, and how they connect up”.
So, in Rée’s picture (as it can be seen), we all share the same world. We just happen to say different things about that same world…
And that’s hardly news.
Take this simple example.
There’s a wooden table in front of a small group of people. That table’s very existence — and even its nature — won’t guarantee that everyone in that group will say exactly the same things about it.
For example, one person in that group may say this:
“It’s a fine example of Chippendale furniture.”
Another person may say this:
“It’s a nice size for a family.”
It must be said that these different (to use Rée's word) “conceptions” of the same table don’t contradict each other. However, they do reflect how it these individuals look at — or think about — it. After all, one person in that group may not have a family and another may never have heard of Chippendale furniture.
In addition, it’s often been remarked that physicists say things about this table which are remarkably at odds with what everyone in that group says or thinks.
For example, a physicist may say (as the cliche has it) this:
“The table is made up mainly of empty space.”
Yet that statement too doesn’t contradict what the rest of the group has said (or thought) either.
Some philosophers would even say the following (at least according to Ted Sider’s take on mereological nihilism):
“A table is made up of mereological simples arranged table-wise.”
None of this really matters if we’re talking about the very same segment of reality or even the very same object. The physicist and metaphysician still eats off the table in front of them even though they look at it in very strange ways — at least they do so when they have their academic hats on.
So the physicist Niels Bohr’s notion of complementarity is useful here. (Bearing in mind that it may be a little suspect to shoehorn ideas and theories from physics into this debate.)
In his book Physics and Philosophy, the physicist Werner Heisenberg summed up Bohr’s complementarity in the following way:
“Bohr considered the two pictures — particle picture and wave picture — as two complementary descriptions of the same reality. Any of these descriptions can be only partially true [].”
Of course some philosophers do indeed believe that we literally inhabit what they call “different worlds”. In basic terms, such philosophers argue that if our conceptual schemes are different, then our worlds must be different too. That’s especially the case if conceptual schemes are taken to determine the worlds we experience and think about. Indeed, on this view, there’d be no world at all if there were no conceptual scheme (or schemes) through which we can experience or conceive of it.
Of course it’s the case that many other philosophers would argue that all this talk of “conceptual schemes” would still not give us literal different worlds.
That’s especially the case if all of us are still in causal contact with the same world and its objects no matter how we describe that world and its objects.
Yet the problem here (if it is a problem) is that, at least according to Donald Davidson (1917–2003), “causation does not come under a description”. And neither is causation in itself “explanatory” in nature.
That said, Davidson also denied that there are genuinely different conceptual schemes in the first place (see Davidson’s ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’). That’s primarily because we all causally interact with the same world — a world which includes the same (as J.L. Austin put it) “medium-sized dry goods” (such as cups, rocks, animals and even other persons). Once these fundamentals are in place, then it would be hard to believe that we literally inhabit different worlds — no matter how different our descriptive or explanatory practices and utterances are.
Thus this situation of plurality in itself doesn’t give us different worlds. It gives us the same world described, explained or conceived of in different ways.
But that’s no surprise to anyone — not even to the metaphysical realist who believes that there’s a determinate way the world is and a single set of truths to be known about it…
Yet none of these fine metaphysical details may matter that much anyway.
Ethics and Politics
Take Richard Rorty again.
Rorty’s prime concern was ethical and/or political in nature.
He was concerned with the importance of conversing (what Rorty called “the conversation”) with other people with different views in order to achieve at least a little consensus and therefore a little less conflict. This is an ethical and/or political aim; just as it was for Emanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.
Another way of putting this is to state that if we really believed that other communities (or cultures) literally spoke “nonsense” (or simply that they inhabited different worlds), then that very incommensurability (see here) would be bound to lead to political or social conflict of some kind.
So Rorty and the other philosophers mentioned above wanted to create the philosophical means to counteract such destructive possibilities. That’s why Heidegger’s metaphysics, for example, has been seen as an ethics — or, at the least, as a “ethico-ontology” (see also Emmanuel Levinas). Indeed it can be doubted that Heidegger — and Derrida for that matter - would have denied this. That’s primarily because they might have argued that this ethics-ontology dichotomy is false (or simply wrong). Similarly, Rorty wouldn’t have denied his ethical and/or political motivations for stressing intersubjectivity, rather than objectivity and truth. That’s because — as already stated — the stress on intersubjectivity was seen by Rorty as a means to keep the conversation going both within the West and between the West and the non-Western world.
Rée himself puts his own slant on this ethico-philosophy (or ethico-ontology) debate when he says the following:
“I mean the fact that it can always turn out that the things that we are convinced are unrevisably true might in fact be problematic in completely unexpected ways.”
That is obviously the case.
Of course what many people take to be “unrevisably true” may turn out to be mistaken in some way — or even to be absolutely false. That is the lesson of fallibilism taught by C.S. Peirce (1839–1914) and other philosophers and which also permeates the natural sciences. Indeed, if we move away from ethics and politics, this may even turn out to be the case with our cherished logical laws and mathematical truths — at least according to Quine (see here). Think also of what some have argued about quantum physics and the law of excluded middle (see here). In addition, dialetheic logicians even believe that the very same proposition (or statement) can be both true and false at one and the same time (see here)!
So perhaps modesty (if not humility) is a good strategy if we can’t even take an absolute position on the truths of logic and mathematics. Of course many other philosophers would question all these so-called “revisions” of the logical laws, etc. (see here and here). They’d also happily admit that even first-rate mathematicians can make mistakes in mathematics. Yet that obvious fact doesn’t in the least lead to any of the aforementioned radical conclusions.
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