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“Dewey and Objectivity”[1]
Talk to Helsinki Metaphysical Club, 16 September 2010
David L. Hildebrand, University of Colorado Denver
Introduction—the persistent issue of Objectivity (various rhetorical and logical purposes)
In a discussion associating his views with those of William James, Richard Rorty once wrote that the word “true” (like the words “good” and “rational”) was merely a normative notion, “a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit in with other sentences which are doing so." (CP xxv)
Perhaps “true” is just a compliment; perhaps not. Regardless, Rorty’s calling it a such has done little to eradicate the constant and practical need of discussing and debating what objectivity is—and is not.
You are all familiar with ways in which philosophers debate “objectivity”: realism versus antirealism, objectivism versus relativism, internalism versus externalism, and so forth.
What fascinates me is that outside of philosophy—in the space philosophers sometimes call “the world” or “the part of existence that charges me rent” –-there are constant appeals to objectivity for all kinds of reasons.
There are appeals to “the fact of the matter,” “the way things really are,” “fair and balanced” news, “the real story,” “the bottom line,” and other phrases all meant to point to something objective—a fact, a truth, a value, and thus to claim a standpoint which is “above it all.” Decisive.
Now there are a variety of motives for saying these things, and many are not philosophical. Let us consider some of the rhetorical aims which can be served by asserting that one’s view is “objective” or “true.”
Rhetorical Aims Served by Appealing to “Objectivity”
For example, when I say, “Here’s what’s really going on…” I may be attempting:
- to end discussion (move towards action)
- to steer discussion in a new direction
- to trump one’s interlocutors (recall Susan Haack’s opening paragraph in last week’s talk noting that “partisanship is treason” and then assuring the audience that she was above such conduct. She was attempting to be objective on issue of naturalism and belief.)
Also, one may be motivated to:
- to present oneself as an “authority” or “expert”
- to distance oneself from prejudice or bias
Also, in claiming I am “being objective” I may also be trying to plead with you, in effect saying:
- I have done my best to size things up; hear me out and correct me if you can
Or simply
- Please believe me!
Or even
- Please stop trying to see things any other way except mine! (I.e., “shut up”)
With only a couple exceptions, most of the rhetorical moves are intended to close down collaborative inquiry. Now, one important reason philosophers like Dewey and Rorty spent time denying there was anything metaphysically deep about objectivity was that they wanted to democratize the way we talk—they wanted to make the discursive space of debate and argument more accessible for everyone who could possibly have something at stake in conversation. They could do this, in part, by showing why it was illegitimate for one group of people (philosophers) to use appeals to transcendent entities (Goodness, Truth, Justice, etc.) as “conversation stoppers.” Their arguments that it was “illegitimate” were philosophical arguments, but they were motivated out of meliorism—out of a moral concern that philosophy play a greater role in the betterment of public life.
But where Rorty was content to criticize then denounce “objectivity” so as to move “solidarity” into its place, Dewey preferred to criticize and then reconstruct “objectivity” – to formulate an instrumental account of it and to integrate it back into his account of inquiry. He recognized, I think, that there was something more to the concept of objectivity than mere metaphysical trickery, something practical in the force of the appeal which deserved philosophical attention. (Objectivity had roots, Dewey thought, in common sense but philosophers had not paid enough attention to those roots.)
Today, drawing on Dewey, I will
(1)first give a Dewey-like account of how belief in traditional Objectivity arises and then reaches a dead end.
(2)Then, I want to draw a contrast between two escape paths from that dead end which pragmatists invite us to take.
- one path is Rorty's “ethnocentrism” –the substitution of solidarity for objectivity
- the other path is Dewey's reconstruction of “objectivity” what I call, “pragmatic objectivity.” I will spend more time on this path describing this and explaining why it is not and cannot be justified in the same way as traditional objectivity.
(3)Finally, since this a “Metaphysical Club” I want to conclude with an appeal for more conversation on the topic of objectivity—where you think it comes from, why you believe it continues to have the force it does. I am sketching this view of objectivity because it has satisfied me so far, but I am eager to expand my understanding of this concept by hearing how you see it.
Dewey’s Diagnosis of How the Ideal of Pure Objectivity Arises
How did we get Objectivity? How might the need for a radical, perspective-less objectivity have arisen? Let me offer a brief 12-step account, based on Dewey's work, of how this happens.
- Problems. As we go through life, problems arise.
- Search for solutions. We respond by struggling and searching to find solutions.
- Solutions. Sometimes, such efforts pay off with solutions that work.
- Failure of old solutions for new problems. Fairly often, working solutions stop working, and need to be scrapped or revised.
- Need to know what makes a better solution “better.” As we reflect on the inadequate solutions, we begin to wonder how to distinguish a good solution from a bad one.
- Criterion of ideal solution identified. Without knowing what specifically is essential to good solutions, we recognize that what we want is for a solution to address the widest possible range of cases over the longest possible run. (Such projections are named “panaceas” or “magic bullets”)
- Search for method securing ideal solution (fruitless). The question arises how an objectively good (enduring and broadly applicable) solution can be discovered.
NOTE: Because this search (7) is exceedingly difficulty, the inquiry quietly abandons its present aim and, thus, jumps the rails, viz.:
- New search to secure ideal: value neutral perspective. It is now supposed that whatever the specific answer might be, because it must cover all cases for the long run it would be just that solution which could be viewed from a perspective-less or god's eye point of view. Notice that inquiry has now shifted from finding what is essential to a good solution to achieving a special, privileged point of view.
- Failure to Occupy Value Neutral Perspective. Achieving a god’s eye/Objective view proves inordinately difficult for human beings since everyone is an individual with a perspective (values, purposes, history) which cannot in actual practice be "set aside"—and so the “god’s eye view” is a view from, literally, “nowhere.” We can generalize and we can abstract but we cannot stand completely outside ourselves to know if our language or logic has “got the world right.”
- Substitution of Fact/Value Separation. As an "Objective" point of view proves impossible, a substitute strategy is now employed: to see a problem “objectively” it is said to be necessary to see it in a “purely factual” light—one which “sets aside” emotion, gender, history, personality—in short, “values.” Objectivity now requires—at the starting point of inquiry—an artificial and hyperbolic separation of facts and values.
- Failure of Fact/Value Separation. But this substitute for an Objective/neutral perspective fails because it cannot be practiced. For one, problematic situations do not come with separate components labeled "fact" and "value." The “facts” about a dying hospital patient cannot be cleanly separated from the “values” entangled with those facts. In other words, in the beginning of inquiry, there is a “situation” and not a congeries of “facts” and “values.” In addition, inquirers cannot, in practice, annihilate their "subjective" or value-laden perspectives before they undertake to select, describe, and interpret those situations.
- Upshot: Blind faith or Endless relativism. Given the failure of achieving the Objective perspective, only two options seem left: (1) “Keep the faith,” that is, accept on faith that a purely Objective standpoint exists—and indeed must exist as a condition of possibility for all less-than-perfect solutions; (2) “Embrace failure,” that is, take the opposite lesson from the failure, namely that there is a never-ending deconstructability of each and every problem—no end to econtexts, perspectives, etc. These alternatives are sometimes called Objectivism and Relativism.
As I mentioned briefly before, Rorty and Dewey respond differently to the traditions failure to achieve Objectivity. Rorty believes that once it is recognized that it is impossible to “stand outside” ourselves and compare our concepts or descriptions with the world, there are few remaining options as to how we should describe a good or “warranted” solution besides the existence of some kind of socio-linguistic consensus. What makes a solution “good,” or a proposition “true,” is determined not by metaphysical appeal or indeed by any philosophical analysis at all, but through conversational “agreement with one’s cultural peers.” These peers, Rorty writes,
“in the process of playing vocabularies and cultures off against each other…produce new and better ways of talking and acting—not better by reference to a previously known standard, but in the sense that they come to seem clearly better than their predecessors.” (CP xxxvii)
The lesson which pragmatists learned from the failure to achieve Objectivity, according to Rorty, is first, that we were seeking the wrong thing; when faced with problems, we should have sought out the greatest amount of solidarity in order to cope with those problems. And second, when we do try to solve problems together—when we discuss, debate, and imagine what to do next—we had better not appeal to anything pre-contextual or pre-linguistic to justify (or validate) the solutions we support. (No appeals to Human Nature, Justice, God’s Will, Experience, Reason, etc.) Talk is all we have. “Pragmatists,” Rorty writes, “would like to replace the desire for objectivity—the desire to be in touch with a reality which is more than some community with which we identify ourselves—with the desire for solidarity with that community.” (ORT 39)
The implication of Rorty’s program stands in contrast to those of other classical pragmatists. (More on Dewey in a moment.) For Rorty’s shift to solidarity would, he says, eliminate much of philosophy’s traditional role. Rorty writes,
[T]hose who wish to reduce objectivity to solidarity—call them "pragmatists"—do not require either a metaphysics or an epistemology. They view truth as, in William James' phrase, what is good for us to believe. So they do not need an account of a relation between beliefs and objects called "correspondence," nor an account of human cognitive abilities which ensures that our species is capable of entering into that relation. They see the gap between truth and justification…simply as the gap between the actual good and the possible better. (ORT 22)
The metaphilosophical question at stake in pragmatism, according to Rorty, is whether “whether there is something other than convenience to use as a criterion in science and philosophy.” (PRM 456) He rejects the notion put forward, he says, by Michael Williams and Hilary Putnam, that the only way we can find radically new ways of seeing things is by employing “something that has nothing to do with convenience—something like a “’metaphysical picture.’” But they are wrong about this, Rorty argues:
“[W]hat pries us out of present convenience is just the hope of greater convenience in the future [where “convenience” means the]… ability to avoid fruitless, irresolvable, disagreements on dead end issues.” (PRM 456-57)
In opposition to Rorty’s vision the Deweyan wants to say, “Yes—you should have ‘hope.’ But hope by itself is not enough.”
Dewey
And so now I turn to Dewey. Along with many others, I have argued that the dichotomy—Solidarity or Objectivity—Rorty presents is not exhaustive; we are not forced to take one horn of the dilemma. As an additional alternative I want now to briefly explain how Dewey articulates an account of justification and pragmatic objectivity that rests on more than just hope, social practices, ethnocentric (albeit tolerant) communities, the play of vocabularies, and strong poets. Dewey, I believe, finds fertile middle ground between the untenable realism both he and Rorty reject and the shifting clutter of discourses Rorty thought we were left with.
Like Rorty, Dewey disavows the Cartesian ideal of the lone inquirer. They’re both Peirceans in this regards—inquiry is a struggle from a lived perspective which includes social an communal aspects. [Note: I am omitting description of Dewey’s concept of “inquiry” here bc I assume it is familiar to you.][2] No problem is ever encountered, evaluated, or resolved in a vacuum; or, to put it in Peirce’s terms, the doubts of concern to scientists, philosophers, and everyday people are “living” or “genuine” doubts and not “paper” doubts. An event is taken as a "problem" (as “genuinely doubtful”) whenever established habits—including preferences and values—are interrupted. In other words, a problem only exists for an inquirer who actually inhabits a perspective and a community. (For reasons we can discuss later, if you want, these perspectives do not engender the problem of solipsism or subjectivism all over again. The self is dynamic, social.)[3]
Dewey position thus stands beyond the dichotomy of absolute objectivity-versus-relativism by mounting a critique of "pure" neutrality or objectivity as unachievable. About pure objectivity Dewey writes
"One can only see from a certain standpoint, but this fact does not make all standpoints of equal value. A standpoint which is nowhere in particular and from which things are not seen at a special angle is an absurdity." (LW6:14-15).
(I would note that it is an under-appreciated fact about radical relativism that it is also guilty of assuming a standpoint which is “nowhere in particular.”)
Indeed, Dewey also criticizes the radical relativist position on the grounds that it assumes that the gaps between perspectives—personal, communal, cultural, national, etc.—could be so large that those perspectives could wind up with nothing substantial in common. For, as Dewey notes, even among the most disparate groups, he notes, "the same predicaments of life recur"(MW9:337). This fact—that predicaments recur—offers, he thinks, an empirical baseline we can consult for forging consensus and inquiry on common challenges. To put it another way, it is a “hope” which is grounded on publically knowable facts. (And Dewey would know: he spent much of his career travelling to other countries, negotiating and mediating between interest groups, and fighting for democratic change.) Thus, Dewey's view stands in direct opposition to Rorty’s ethnocentric resignation to what he estimates to be significant and permanent limits to inter-cultural communication.
Pragmatic Objectivity
Let me move now to Dewey’s positive and reconstructed account of objectivity, what I call “pragmatic objectivity.” It provides an alternative to objectivism and linguistic relativisms by appealing to basic norms of empirical experimentation—for example, that an inquiry is conducted with conditions and procedures that are avowed (announced and fully explicit) and transparent (open to any who would wish to repeat the experiment for themselves).
What is already clear, then, about pragmatic objectivity is that its chief concern is with the process of inquiry. Objectivity is not an end-state of inquiry; rather, it describes a set of epistemic virtues of practice. These virtues, as active ways of behaving, provide inquiry with a regulative ideal.
Consider as an example, an investigation into a past event. In traditional conceptions of objectivity—say, an "objective account" of a historical event, for example—the intent is to depict what "actually happened." Seeing no way to hit such an experience-transcendent target, the pragmatist translates "objective account" as the obligation of inquirers to adhere to those regulative habits which make inquiry an effective process. A pragmatist can accept the traditionalist's search for "what really happened" ifit is understood within a pragmatic rubric about the habits of inquiry. Taken in this way, a search for "what really happened," Dewey writes,
is a valuable methodological canon [because it is] interpreted as a warning to avoid prejudice, to struggle for the greatest possible amount of objectivity and impartiality, and as an exhortation to exercise caution and skepticism in determining the authenticity of material proposed as potential data. Taken in any other sense, it is meaningless. (LW 12: 236, my emphasis.)
None of Dewey’s methodological rules seem unorthodox. What makes them pragmatic is that their value lies in their function in regulating the process of inquiry rather than their contribution to ensuring a correspondence with what is "real." Dewey writes,
"To be 'objective' in thinking is to have a certain sort of selective interest operative....One may have affection for a standpoint which gives a rich and ordered landscape rather than for one from which things are seen confusedly and meagerly." (LW6:14-15)
We are seeking to make inquiry “objective” because we have, Dewey says, a certain sort of selective interest—we want to order, predict, enrich our future experience along lines we already value. Objectivity is a selectively-interested standpoint, but it a standpoint we have devised to address problems which threaten the ways of life we value. Objectivity is a tool.
The Ground of Pragmatic Objectivity and the Threat of Relativism
Critics' greatest concern with Dewey’s operational-pragmatic account of objectivity is that it is relativistic—fixed by no standards independent of human activity and so incapable of providing a permanent prescriptive answer to the problems which make us reach for objectivity in the first place. But if we recognize that we cannot start from a “neutral” standpoint, we also recognize that we must start from where we are—that is, with our cares and concerns. Thus, the concern about relativism may be set aside.
Perhaps a more interesting question concerns the age-old condemnation of pragmatism that it is “too pragmatic” or “narrowly pragmatic” in the sense of seeking short-term, materialistic, or capitalistic aims. In essence, this is a question about the biases of pragmatism, and so it raises a more interesting question for the pragmatist than the standard “How is pragmatism different than relativism?”