Mike,

Rorty’s rhetoric obviously got up your nose, but it was notable how much you ended up sounding very Rortyian yourself in the end. In many respects your conception of our predicament as human (what else?) knowers chimes with Rorty’s. You object only to the conclusions he draws from this about the vocabulary of truth and objectivity. And in this respect, of course, you are like Williams. Your remarks put me in mind of John McDowell. I looked up McDowell’s paper in Rorty and his Critics (Robert B. Brandom (ed), Blackwell 2000). I’ll borrow from his excellent diagnosis later. It’s worth me trying to say a bit about Rorty’s remarks in his review; it’s instructive, though I may end up re-iterating thoughts I had last time. (All the quotes from Rorty are from his review on the London Review of Books website. I’ve declined to use the page numbers on my hard copy).

What struck me about Rorty’s review (and perhaps this is just vanity) is the way it pretty much echoes the worry I tried to express last time, that Williams finds it hard to find a space from which to make a stand in defence of the value of truth, so much is he in agreement with the deniers (Rorty’s species of which he likes to describe as a descendent of Pragmatism: James and Dewey) on most matters other than the legitimacy of truth talk. Rorty notes that many readers of his book will think that Williams has "long since gone over to the dark side." After all, Rorty points out, he rejects philosophies "such as Plato’s, in which ‘the concept of truth is inflated into providing some metaphysical teleology for human existence’", and the Kantian idea of a Moral Law "that governs us all equally without recourse to power". Says Rorty, "Having conceded so much to the opposition, he has to work hard to secure a middle-of-the-road position – to avoid drifting either to the Platonist right or to the pragmatist left."

According to Rorty, Williams acknowledges that the deniers share his "passionate devotion to the political heritage of the Enlightenment". But he thinks that, by denying truth, they threaten liberalism. Deniers (of whom he styles Rorty as a ‘moderate’ exponent) "need to take seriously the idea that to the extent that we lose a sense of the value of truth, we shall certainly lose something, we may well lose everything." What we cannot lose sight of, thinks Williams, is that the virtues of truth and truthfulness (Accuracy and Sincerity) have intrinsic not merely instrumental value, and that this a distinction the deniers cannot accommodate. For his part, Rorty characteristically insists that a difference that doesn’t make a difference is no difference at all; and he thinks it’s impossible to mark this difference in a way that doesn’t re-import all the bad Platonic and Christian metaphysics Williams eschews. Rorty doesn’t see how Williams pulls this off.

The argument Rorty focuses on is Williams’ thought that social institutions, and the cooperation and trust that underlie them, could not exist without respect for the virtues of what he calls Sincerity and Accuracy. A value, for Williams, is intrinsic if "it is necessary for basic human purposes and needs that human beings should treat it as an intrinsic good," and they can do so coherently. In an oddly verificationist mood, Rorty thinks the "utility" of this definition "depends on there being a way of telling when people are treating something as an intrinsic good"; and he adds, "it is not clear what behavioural test Williams has in mind here." Any "evidence" for the claim, Rorty seems to think, could be interpreted otherwise. Thus, a difference that can’t be displayed behaviourally is useless.

But what does Rorty mean by behavioural test here. After all, it’s Rorty’s term, not, as far as I recall, one Williams uses. And I’m guessing Williams doesn’t use it because he has no intention of employing the argument in the tendentious way Rorty reads into him. I think Williams has (or ought to have) something more akin to a transcendental argument in mind, though to be sure it may seem dangerous to put it in those terms. That is, I don’t think commitment to the ‘virtues of truth’ is something that one ought to expect to be observable in terms the description of which does not already presuppose that commitment, if it is to do the work Williams wants it to. Rather, the commitment is (something like) a necessary condition of something acknowledged by all parties, namely a socially cohesive existence, regimented in the appropriate ways (which Williams styles as registered in the virtues of Truth and Sincerity). This idea of a transcendental reading will come up again when I draw on McDowell’s diagnosis of Rorty’s scepticism about the vocabulary of objectivity. I think the best reading of Williams is one which refuses to allow Rorty even the right to speak of ‘our representations’, as if this notion is one which has content independently of the question whether we can employ a vocabulary of truth; objectivity and answerablity to a world independent of those representations is, as it were, constitutive (admittedly, we both know what a hand-wave this term can be) of the notion of talk which performs in representationalist ways. Here is where things get delicate. Rorty thinks that such a vocabulary could only be part of our representations, internal to our practices of talking about the world, not a way of expressing an attempt say something, from a standpoint outside or independent of talk about a world, about the way that talk is anchored, some of it better than others, to THE WORLD in-itself. Well indeed. That’s a way of putting what I’m trying to say when I appeal to a transcendental reading of Williams’ claims about intrinsic value. I can’t quite put my finger on this (perhaps you might help), but I want to say that the transcendental reading is meant to appropriate a more robust notion of truth, objectivity, etc, than Rorty can admit. When the insistence is made that truth is, in Williams’ terms, ‘intrinsic’ - in my terms, truth is indispensable to our discourse even seeming to be ‘truth-apt’, a condition on the possibility of such talk – it is the robust sense that is in play.

Rorty can only hear, in the talk about intrinsic value, a claim that is mythically independent of practice, not a condition on our practice. As far as Rorty is concerned, Williams cannot make sense of ‘intrinsic value’ without taking a lot of Platonic-looking baggage on board. (Is it worth saying that Platonic-looking baggage and Platonic baggage are not the same thing?). What is frustrating about these debates is that one is inclined to read Rorty as, on one hand, disparaging this presumption of mythical lofty independence from what is visible from within and licensed by our practices of talking about things being thus and so, but on the other claiming, from the same lofty standpoint, that our practices of talking are just more instances of ‘stuff happening’ – perturbations in the causal nexus where creatures like us happen to be (is this too much of a caricature?). Indeed, where else might the latter claim seem to be credible but from the ‘lofty’ standpoint (the ‘God’s-Eye’ View); it sure isn’t credible from our ‘immersed’ standpoint. From there, to be sure, there is nothing like representing selves ‘set over against’ an ontological divide, beyond which sits the alien ‘in-itself’. But that isn’t how it seems from the immersed point of view either. That is rather a philosophical gloss, which Rorty and Williams both eschew. The debate is over what a ‘perspicuous representation’ of our immersed standpoint affords us; what it entitles us to say reflectively about it. I’m trying to defend the idea that Williams’ defence is robust truth: more than best agreement, or ideal agreement; rather an inherent appeal to answerability to what is the case independently of agreement. There is, in the sense Rorty appears to have in mind, no ‘behavioural test’ for distinguishing these two construals (robust from ‘minimal’ truth), but this sounds like a demand for a criterion of distinction that registers from the ‘God’s-eye’ standpoint – surely something Rorty cannot consistently appeal to.

The baggage Rorty thinks Williams trades on is "the bad Platonic-Aristotelian practice of distinguishing the real from the merely human, the in-itself from the for-us." It is this distinction that makes room for the distinction between truth (in-itself) and justification (for-us): there is a difference Williams needs, according to Rorty, between "acquiring beliefs that can be justified to the relevant audience and … acquiring true beliefs". The latter is a way of defending the pursuit of truth as an intrinsic value, not something the cash-value of which can only be couched in terms of passing muster in justificatory exchanges with our fellow citizens. But the pragmatist owes us a story about how we tell methods for acquiring at truth from other methods for acquiring consensus (surely a distinction any fan of liberalism will want to respect).

Rorty’s answer: "The procedures we use for justifying beliefs to one another are among the things we try to justify to one another." What else is there to say if, as Williams himself concedes, we have no way to compare our representations as a whole with the way things are in themselves? Rorty goes on to disparage Williams for his alleged claim that philosophy professors "stand in neutral ground when deciding between various ways of reaching agreement"; they have "special knowledge and techniques that enable us [despite the inability to compare our representations as a whole] to show that the procedures we now think to be truth-acquiring actually are so." According to Rorty, Williams’ criticism of the indistinguishability argument stands or falls on the availability of this neutral standpoint on the part of analytic metaphysicians and epistemologists. As far as Rorty’s pragmatists are concerned, their best guesses are on a par with Locke theory of simple ideas, etc. I’ve tried to claim that the indistinguishability argument itself - "Give me a behavioural criterion – a difference that makes a difference, behaviourally!" – seems to flirt with that standpoint. The difference between truth and agreement is perfectly vivid to participants in the practice of ‘giving and asking for reasons’; it is a falsification of competence with the practices of inquiry to suppose that it is, for participants, exhausted by justifications of justifications of belief. That is a kind of category mistake. What we try to justify is the claim that a belief is true; it being true is something else – the world being as we believe it to be!

Rorty seems to fixate on the status of the claim, which we make, in a philosophical voice, as it were, that some beliefs are true, not just, for now, better justified. But the transcendental manoeuvre I sketched, on Williams’ behalf, is meant to be the best one can do without seeming to mis-identity adoption of the philosophical voice as such for adoption of the ‘God-s-eye view’; it is meant to be a ‘domesticated’ transcendentalism, so to speak! What it is meant to register is no more than we all ‘know’, in ordinary practice; in this sense, the position is supposed to be what is sometimes called ‘quietist’.

Rorty’s indistinguishability argument perhaps trades on the thought that we cannot see ourselves, as participants, doing anything else when we believe truly than when we hold a belief that we manage to defend from all-comers. But that is just to say, precisely, that being true is something else than justifying well. What this suggests is the idea that we can never know whether we are right – the idea that truths transcend even our best efforts. There is something intolerable to Rorty about this. But why can it not be merely an acknowledgement of fallibility. Well, this might seem to Rorty to be no more than the idea that we acknowledge that there can always be future audiences who will not acquiesce to my claims as present ones have. We can always re-phrase things like this – in this reductive way. But this doesn’t mean we are getting things… well, right, when we do. But obviously, we’re kind of back to square one.

I agree with Rorty that Williams’ middle ground is an elusive one; my own efforts just now reveal what a difficult stance it is to adopt. But his rhetoric struck me as uncharitable and tendentious. I think both Williams and Rorty agree that what we can say here has to be said from, as it were, the participant standpoint, one characterised by, to quote McDowell, "the sheer contingency that attaches to our being in a historically evolved cultural position." Neither wishes to appeal to some illusory Archimedian "sideways-on" vantage point (the ‘God’s-eye’ view) from which we might compare our representations wholesale with some unmediated access to reality ‘as it is in in-itself’. The question then is what is sayable from the immersed standpoint. And what is always striking to me in these debates is that both parties will accuse the other of covertly adopting the God’s-eye view. It is common, for example, to accuse deniers of having to covertly rely on the standpoint they disparage in order to state the predicament in a way that motivates their conclusions (I just did it myself).

To speak of being answerable to the world in ways that do not reduce to what we can make acceptable to our fellows by the standards of current best practice is not to speak from a sideways-on standpoint. It is part of the bare idea of talking about a world at all. If we really could give no content to the idea, we could give no content to the idea of a world about which we talk. …

My defence, following McDowell (with more than "coat-trailing approval"), of the idea of answerability to the world disagrees with your own stated view last time and I want to try to get you to rethink (perhaps only pedantically). You say,

"My objection is that our struggle to form true opinions about the world around us (including ourselves) is not a court case between us and Reality or the Truth. We are not in any sort of dispute with Reality. … We answer to our fellow man for getting it right about reality; we don’t answer to Reality. We strive to get the best possible take on it."

That we answer only to our fellow man is a Rortyian idea, surely. It makes me unsure where you stand between Rorty and Williams within this delicate middle-ground. Especially since you also say,

"It seems to me that a person who really gave up the ideal of knowledge would sink into a kind of claustrophobic pragmatism."

This sounds more Williams.

Rorty thinks that truth-talk aims to reflect an attempt to do more than this, and that either (a) no purpose is served by reconstruing truth-talk as ‘an empty compliment we pay to claims which pass muster in justificatory exchanges with our fellows’ (the moderate view), or (b) it must be jettisoned altogether, on pain, I guess, of a kind of false consciousness.

As you note, Rorty thinks (following Nietzsche) that answerability to something other than our fellows, to something non-human, the world in-itself, is

"… a surrogate for God, and that we would be stronger, freer, better human beings if we could bring ourselves to dispense with all such surrogates: to stop wanting to have ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ on our side."

As McDowell puts Rorty’s claim,

" If we conceive of inquiry and judgement in terms of making ourselves answerable to the world, as opposed to being answerable to our fellows, we are merely postponing the completion of the humanism whose achievement begins with discarding authoritarian religion." (Rorty and his Critics, p.110).

McDowell thinks that Rorty misdiagnoses here. The culprit that should be Rorty’s target, is not the bare idea of answerability to the world, which is built into the notion of objectivity (compare McDowell’s reading of Wittgenstein on rule-following and meaning: the meaning of a word invokes a determination of how a word should be applied in the future if it is to accord with the meaning we give it now, without our having to ratify its application when we encounter a new case. This smacks of mythical Platonism – ‘rules as rails’ that extend into the future independently of how we find it natural to go on. McDowell’s thinks that whatever anti-Platomism is indeed in Wittgenstein cannot involve a denial of ‘ratification independence’ of future applications, since this is part of what we mean by ‘meaning’!). Rather, the culprit is,

"…the frame of mind in which the world to which we want to conceive of our thinking as answerable threatens to withdraw out of reach of anything we can think of as our means of access to it."

This remark seems to be what motivates the worry earlier that when we insist that we might never know whether a claim is true, we are thinking of The World as withdrawing from thought as such, in the way McDowell outlines here.

I think McDowell’s stance is a good support for Williams. I’m sure you will want to go along with this. What is at stake in your denial that we can be sanguine about the notion of answerablity? It’s notable that McDowell, in his Mind and World, thinks that the world is not beyond "the space of reasons and concepts" (that’s why it’s not beyond our reach in the way mentioned just now). It is inherently conceptual: what we can think (something conceptual) is what can be the case; a kind of identity is being claimed. And a striking comment he makes is this:

"I have urged that conceptual capacities, capacities for the kind of understanding whose correlate is the kind of intelligibility that is proper to meaning, are operative also in our perception of the world apart from human beings. The question is how we can take that view without offering to reinstate the idea that the movement of the planets, or the fall of a sparrow, is rightly approached in the sort of way approach a text or an utterance or some other kind of action."

This odd sounding thought (more extravagant than McDowell would ever wish to be, surely) seems to flirt with a notion of the world as enchanted or personalised in some way, which you seem to be suspicious of in the talk of answerability of the world – as opposed to our fellows. Yet, to be crudely brief, this kind of picture seems to be part of how McDowell (and if we want to make him an ally of Williams, how Williams too) secures a presence of a mind independent world in thought, in a way which rationalises the truth-aptness and objectivity of that thought, but without mythologizing it with Platonic baggage…. So, what to do….