Some Reflections on Richard Rorty's Philosophy Tibor R. Machan Part I: Determinate Reality or Not? In the Introduction to the first volume of his collected papers1 Richard Rorty advances his by now familiar case against the view he characterizes as representationalism. It will be best if we let Rorty state his own position: On an antirepresentationalist view, it is one thing to say that a prehensile thumb, or an ability to use the word "atom" as physicists do, is useful for coping with the environment. It is another thing to attempt to explain this utility by reference to representationalist notions, such as the notion that the reality referred to by "quark" was "determinate" before the word "quark" came along (whereas that referred to by, for example, "foundation grant" only jelled once the relevant social practice eme rged).2 It is not my concern to argue here that terms "represent" reality, since I am not sure how precisely words or ideas do their work of enabling us to do what representationalists and others wish to call attention to and identify relating our c ognitive relationship to the rest of the world. My purposes here is to try to rescue foundationalism from Rorty's attempt to discredit it, mainly by showing that Rorty's efforts are not successful and are, moreover, self-defeating despite any denials tha t this is so. (I have elsewhere developed my own positive case for what I call a minimalist foundationalism.3 ) I will also make mention of an important result of Rorty's anti-foundationalism and his support of what might be called a pragmatic epistemic stance of solidarity for politics. This is the practical or public affairs domain where, by Rorty's own explicit claim, his views serve the purpose of supporting something like communitarianism and opposing classical liberal individualist principles. To start with, Rorty will have no less trouble with notions such as that "the word `quark' ... is useful for coping with the environment" than others have had with the notion that "quark" represents reality (as we think and talk). Rorty has done no thing more than to switch vocabulary, unless, of course, he is defending the position that he has clearly disavowed, namely, that the words he uses tell it - i.e., identify reality - better than do the words of those he is criticizing. Which is to say so mething close enough to the representationalists' claim, namely, that Rorty's chosen words better "`correspond to' or `represent' the environment" than some other people's chosen words manage to, in this instance that feature of the environment involving the relationship between words used by human beings and what those words are used to mean. Second, Rorty's deprecation of the claim that "the reality referred to by `quark' was `determinate' before the word `quark' came along" is self-defeating. Here is one way that point can be defended: Whenever anyone wishes to render Rorty's own view s (E.g., in print, before a classroom), it will be expected, for example, by Rorty himself, that the effort will be successful at referring to (or representing or meaning or identifying) a feature of reality -- namely, to Rorty's written expression of his ideas. That, in turn, will have been there - i. e., in existence - prior to the time its rendition is given (e.g., in this paper, in some book on 20th century pragmatic thought). Such a person will not be expected to produce some invention we will call "Rorty's views." There is, thus, a presumption of what Rorty or his representationalist adversaries call a "determinate" reality in such cases, namely, the determinate reality of Rorty's own writings.4 If some teacher proceeded to say that Rorty is, after all, just a relativist, a neo-Marxist or a post-modernist deconstructionist, Rorty could quite rightly object -- as he indeed does object throughout his recent book to being classified in various terms other than those he himself has chosen or regar ds as fitting his (pre-existent) written work. This is all we expect of people who come forth and put it to us that they have identified something that they believe is best designated by whatever they define as "quark." What is wrong with Rorty's worry about representationalism and thus with his rejection of a determinate reality? In reply, first, not all who reject Rorty's viewpoint agree (as Rorty suggests that they do) that we can "climb out of our minds"5 or find "a skyhook -- something which might lift us out of our beliefs"6 as we figure out the cognitive relationship at issue. That language simply does not capture the position of many who do hold that when we think and talk we are indeed thinking and talking, if taking good care, about a reality that is not being shaped or created or distorted or otherwise influenced by our minds. The thinking and talking is, of course, not independent of our minds -- we do those with our minds and the assistance of some other tools or faculties we possess and are normally involved in the achievement of those tasks. Accordingly, when we say "Rorty's position" in the context of a discussion such as the present, there is indeed a reality, namely, Rorty's position, we are thinking and talking about distinct from our thinking and talking. Whereas when we say Hamlet 's position on death, it is merely fictional, when we speak of Hamlet's position on minimum wage laws it is non-existent, so no reality corresponds to or is meant by that reference. In order to appreciate these points, it is entirely unnecessary to make use of notions such as "getting out of our minds." What we do by way of our minds is nothing less than focus on reality and accurately understand it, at least when we manage to do well at the tasks we undertake by the use of our minds. Indeed, a better conceptualization of what is going on is suggested by the German term "Begriff" and the English term "grasp" or, perhaps even more fittingly, "grab." By "begreifen" one means to apprehend or take cognizance of, as with the term "grasp\grab" in the context of discussing the functioning of the mind vis-a-vis reality (including itself). And just as grasping some object, say, with one's hand does not in the slightest suggest that t he object has been intruded upon or altered, so when one grasps or has come to know something, this too lacks the slightest hint of having thus intruded upon or altered what has come to be grasped or known.7 Fortuitously, perhaps, the analogy be tween "know' and "grasp\grab" also accommodates another concern of pragmatists, namely, that when one grasps\grabs an object, one need not have full, complete and timeless control of it; one needs to have it well enough in hand to proceed with one' s purposes. Thus cases of knowing something need not satisfy some model of certainty "beyond a shadow of doubt," only "beyond a reasonable doubt." Now just as grasping or grabbing something may have to involve more or less delicacy and could indeed go a wry by mishandling what is grasped/grabbed -- to the point that the grabbing may indeed significantly disturb the object being grabbed -- so with knowing. When one knows X, the act of knowing X may be entirely objective in some cases where the process ha s been highly refined, while it may involve some minor or major distortions or intrusions where the knowing involved a more sloppy process -- e.g., embarked upon with careless prejudices or preconceptions obstructing the result. I point this out in respo nse to some observations of skeptics vis-a-vis this portion of my discussion. Thus, if I grab a plastic cup, while some microscopic changes may be brought about in the cup in consequences of this, they are inconsequential for the cup as a cup, where as i f a very powerful person grabs that cup and puts a dent in it, the grabbing will have resulted in altering the cup as a cup. Similarly, knowing X may be done in a way that nothing of X qua X is influenced by the process, while it may also be done in a wa y that X is disturbed, as per the famous Heisenberg principle whereby the knowledge of some subatomic entities is nearly impossible without influencing those entities in their very identities. Again, when we know X, must we be influencing X? This notion is what brings into question whether what we know is in fact X or, rather, X+our-impact-on-X. But knowing X is not molding but grasping it, not shaping but embracing it, as it were. It is as if when we took a photograph, the camera could not possibly obtain an accurate rendition of what it is taking a picture of because it must be making an impact upon the world as it is taking its picture. Yet, it is far more reasonable to think that the little bit of impact that light may make on the feature of the world we want to photograph is so minor as to be insignificant for purposes of causing any change in it (and, indeed, we can detect that impact only because we are able to know both the being of which we are taking a photograph and the light that has that minor impact on it). Or it is as if when we grasp something, say a hammer, in doing so we must be having an impact upon it so that this may well make it into something other than what it is , a hammer. The view I propose is perhaps helpful in understanding how human beings relate to reality as they act in the role of knowers. Some have lamented that this relationship is too possessive - knowledge is thus akin to acquisition. Yet knowledge in fact is much closer to tracking (as spelled out in Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations [Harvard University Press, 1981]). Thus, it seems right, all around, to think that what we know is left unchanged by the fact that we know it. So that when we know something, our knowledge is of this (unchanged-by-our-knowing-it) being, not of something that has somehow been influenc ed or changed by the fact of being known to us. The reason this is a better way to understand it is that any way of understanding knowing the world will suggest that that is indeed how we know the world, rather than that is how we have shaped the world c oncerning what we call our knowing something of it. It is important to consider a point of history in this connection. When Western philosophy took its turn from a metaphysical to an epistemological emphasis -- roughly with Descartes -- it also became attractive to offer mechanistic explanations for everything (in nature). Once, especially under the influence of secular empiricism, the functioning of the human mind had to be explained within this framework, it was very tempting to see the identity of the human mind in terms that required ascribing t o its operations certain powers of efficient causation. Even in Kant, who allowed himself a measure of dualism via his postulation of the noumenal realm, the sensory organs as organs of the human body were seen as exerting a causal influence upon what th ey perceived and thus, also, the human mind, upon what it understood or came to know. Perhaps, once the universality of the mechanistic framework is no longer deemed required, as now, we could also consider abandoning the idea that the faculty of knowledge, of conceptual consciousness, must have an identity of the sort that has to exe rt (efficient) causal influences in the course of its essential operations. Instead, we could reconsider the earlier approach, evident in Aristotle and, especially, in Aquinas, namely, that the human mind works by way of intentionality -- a kind of focus ing upon what its object of attention happens to be -- and grasps what it does without having in the slightest to disturb it in the process. Accordingly, what is mishandled by Rorty is the conceptualization of the mind. He takes it to be a kind of force that works reality over before we manage by its use to bring various aspects of reality to our attention. It is as if when we consider what a camera does, we think of it as a kind of intruder upon the scene it in fact manages to capture on film. Or suppose that when we grasp an object we believed that the act of grasping it distorts it and by the time we have grasped it, we no longer ar e dealing with the object we set out to grasp. Instead, in all these cases we are not dealing with faculties, instruments or behavior that intrude at all -- unlike, say, a rough jackhammer or even a dentist's fine drill. We are dealing with the faculty the use of which serves to either inform or otherwise facilitate us in coping with the nature of the world as it is, not as we might invent or even reform, reshape or rearrange it. The mind works on the order more of grasping than of molding. So there is simply no need to insist that we cannot g et out of it -- it is not something "in which" we are, anymore than something "out of which" we can climb. Finally, it is notable that all the efforts Rorty invests in recasting the projects of philosophers into his own terms raise the difficulties he claims mostly his adversaries are encountering. For example, when he tries to "represent objectivity as intersubjectivity, or as solidarity,"8 he cannot avoid such traditional philosophical issues as whether we do in fact come to understand or mean by "solidarity" something determinate in the world -- e.g., a species or type of human relationships? Or are we leaving it in Rorty's or anyone's hands to dictate what "solidarity" should mean? Will "community" mean what it seems in the context of Rorty's discussion, namely, the familiar sets of relationship between human beings in some familiar, fraternal, sp atial, professional, or other setting? Is there, perhaps, a determinate reality, after all, or at least the possibility of such a reality, that the word "solidarity" or "community" means in our tongue? Or does Rorty (and anyone else) have carte blanche as far as what is to be understood by us when he uses the term? How, then, can we understand his suggestions in the first place? How can we make sure what he means?9 Furthermore, what is Rorty's mention of the community supposed to accomplish? Wh at seems evident enough, especially in our contemporary world -- especially in the United States of America -- is that we belong to innumerable communities, more one day and fewer the next, moving between them frequently, needing very often to judge which deserves our loyalty, which we should value higher, which lower. At a very early age people begin to have to evaluate whether their communities are deserving of their allegiance -- when, for example, they challenge their family's various opinions, or wh en they stand opposed to the demands placed upon their by the laws of their society, their schools, clubs, churches, etc. This would make it very difficult to fully account for what people do when they think and judge as expressing the views they received from their community. Indeed, at some point nearly anyone who is not purely a passive human being needs to get into the drivers seat, so to speak, and judge some matters for him or herself. Just what degree of contribution the individual makes probably differs between human beings, but there is little doubt that Rorty's project of trying to reduce all individuality t o some community membership is misguided. At a broader, political level -- for Rorty is well aware that he can put to political use all this redoing of the philosophical enterprise10 -- Rorty will face the same problems all collectivist face, namely, that however much human beings are socia l or tribal or communal, they are also, essentially and inescapably, individual. His effort to substitute solidarity for objectivity runs into very serious problems. He himself, for example, refuses to conform to his own community of epistemologists -- he is constantly differentiating himself from deconstructionists and radical multiculturalists.11 In addition, there are simply too many diverse communities to which we all are likely to belong at the same time or over time, sometimes making entirely in compatible demands upon us. These demands will have to be assessed by each of us individually, with at most a little help from our friends but by no means with the option of abdicating individual responsibility. The human individual's creative role in l ife, especially concerning some of his or her ideas, is so basic that the insistence on epistemological solidarity or communitarianism simply will not manage to erase it. Human beings, in short, must come to terms with some vital options as individuals, including the option of whether to join this or that cultural, professional, or political community of individuals.12 Not just any community will do and even those we choose to belong to must be ranked in importance, a task that we cannot simply give to yet another community, There will always be questions pertaining to the suitability of the recommended community for individuals who face the option of participating in it as well as the suitability of the order of priorities in our loyalty to the sever al communities to which we belong. This is indeed the problem faced both by radical and by conservative collectivists.13 It is also the main reason for the development of the very sort of rights theory Rorty finds objectionable, one the implementation o f which in a legal system offers some measure of protection against being bullied into accepting the judgments of others in vital matters of belief and conduct. It is also for this reason that Rorty's "moral equivalency" thesis vis-a-vis anti-liberal reg imes will fall on deaf if not outright resentful ears among the opponents of tyrannies and dictatorships. It is also important that there are many different strains of belief emanating from roughly the same approach to philosophy Rorty embraces. This new turn, despite its championing of consensus over metaphysics as the ground of harmony, promises very little agreement despite its constant rhetoric in favor of solidarity rather than independent objective thinking. We have, among others, Rorty, the deconstructionists, Paul Feyerabend, and -- perhaps surprisingly for those such as Rorty -- a host of cons ervatives who admonish us to trust the group.14 Richard Rorty has certainly managed to take center stage with his pragmatic philosophy during the last decade of Anglo-American philosophical dialogue. I am doubtful, however, that his is the call we ought to heed as far as philosophical wisdom is concerned. Part II: The Incoherence of Historicism One if not the most prominent philosophical movements in our time is historicism, the view that what we should believe is a matter of whether in our own period of history we -- i.e., those in our community15 -- find it congenial, satisfactory, worka ble, or practical. This position stands against the idea that at least some beliefs may be sound at any time, regardless of the situation that happens to prevail. Historicism has been seeking philosophical allegiance throughout human intellectual hi story. Traces may be found in Pyrrhonism, Hegelianism, John Stuart Mill's progressivism and Karl Marx's understanding of economics and politics. Some of these views maintain that human beings actually change their nature as time passes. So what was rig ht for them economically or politically in the past is not what it is now. In Marx's view, just as a child's needs change upon his or her development -- biologically, nutritionally, psychologically, and so forth -- so humanity itself changes its needs. And there are no transhistorical or ahistorical needs at all. Therefore there are no beliefs about what is true or right that last throughout human history.16 Need we note a puzzle in this position, namely, that the belief we call historicism (and its cognates) itself cannot in its own terms be ahistorically true? Some historicists, such as Richard Rorty, admit to this consequence of their position and go on to treat it as of no great significance. We are to take it that historicists may soon rec ant their position and adopt an ahistorical stance, as soon as circumstances warrant. Yet Rorty's admission is itself difficult to square with historicism. Presumably in making it, he is referring to some ahistorical feature of human knowledge, namely, its constant revisability. Thus those who deny that beliefs can be true for all o f human history are evidently adhering to and, by implication, advancing just such a belief, namely, their historicist idea, one that supposedly accurately reflects or represents how human beings ought to cope with their environments.17 By their account it was true at the beginning, in the middle and at the current stage of humanity's life span that what is true and right depended on historical circumstances or, at any rate, that whatever we ought to think at any such point of history is inherently and invariably revisable. Nothing is constant outside of change. Throughout history there have been those who held just that belief. In ancient times it was Heraclitus and his followers. In the 18th century its major proponent was George Hegel. In the 19th century it was Karl Marx. Today, especially in America, it is Richard Rorty. Each, in his own terms of course, held to this view and each knew that his predecessor was a kindred spirit. Today Rorty embraces Hegel, knowing full well that what R orty believes -- maybe expressed in slightly different terms -- is more than less what Hegel believed. Other recent adherents are Heidegger, Kojeve, Derrida, Gadamer, and Davidson.18 All of these were and are thoughtful and their historicism isn't some flippantly contrived doctrine to be simply dismissed, as we often dismiss the caricatures of such theories in introductory epistemology or ethics courses. So why would they propound something paradoxical, namely, that beliefs are historically condit ioned and/or revisable except for the belief that beliefs are historically conditioned and/or revisable?19 The answer that suggests itself to me is that these thinkers, as indeed many others, retain, despite their own disclaimer, a deep desire to un derstand everything just one general way.20 If they have found that some vital beliefs are indeed historically conditioned -- for example, that certain ways of eating are best for human beings, a judgment that surely changes with time because science co mes up with new ideas that we have lacked before and because technology makes some ways of preparing food possible now that were impossible in the past -- they seem to want to generalize the point. This is odd. For the central tenet of historicism is th at no universal, timeless truths exists. Yet here we are facing historicists generalizing historicism! Curious, especially since not much is said about this fact in their works. Yet, of course, the motivation behind historicist and comparable doctrines is not without merit. We do understand the world differently from how we did before; our definitions do need changing; science sees things anew every other decade or so; mora lity and politics fluctuate drastically, at times, and not apparently only because human beings are evasive or negligent about what is right and good. But the historicist answer fails to meet the requirement of making sense of our own cognitive experiences. So I propose to amend it by advancing what I like to call a pluralistic approach21 to understanding human knowledge. Simply put, some knowled ge, such as the one I referred to about nutrition -- but we could also have mentioned certain features of morality, politics, psychology, or engineering -- are indeed true or right only within a given historical period, since throughout history facts emer ge and disappear to make them or break them. Some beliefs apply long enough so that one is tempted to think them universal, even though they are not strictly speaking that. For example, in the botanical sciences there are some beliefs that are true or r ight over centuries, although, plants themselves are not unchanging in how they behave, what they need, the climate that suits them best for growth and flourishing. While the truths of botany are not quite universal, neither are they true or right just f or -- that is, relative to -- some brief period of human history. There are other beliefs, such as some things in morality and maybe politics, as well as psychology, that are sound throughout the time period that human beings have existed because they id entify what is most fitting or suitable for us to do as human beings (rather than as citizens, students, men, women, or computer programmers -- all of which can be historically relative or changing features of some people's identity) vis-a-vis the nature or basic features of the world around us. For example, it may be that some of the virtues identified by Aristotle are universal (enough) in this sense -- we all are doing the right thing if we use our heads ("right reason") as we cope with reality, inclu ding each other. The condition of economic, social and political liberty may indeed be suitable in this sense in any period of human history, even if people have failed to live accordingly. Honesty, prudence, courage, and justice may all be ways for us to carry on in life, so long as we are indeed human beings, with a given basic nature. Yet it is not certain that some very similar but also different being should act the same way on this earth or somewhere in the universe. So while such principles of conduct may be universal -- applicable to all members of the "universe" of human beings, past, present and future -- they are true or right only while there are human beings. Others, in turn, may be more temporal even than these -- e.g., judgments as to marital responsibilities, what counts as responsible business practice, and how a child should be brought up (by making him work hard, which could at times amount to child abuse and at other times as sound rearing). But there may also be beliefs, say about certain principles or laws found in various branches of study -- metaphysics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics -- that do not vary at all because they are beliefs about the world as it has always bee n, is and will be. There may not be too many of these, for not too much remains the same over time -- even if it appears to last in contrast to the more rapid changes we are also familiar with. But, for example, it seems fairly if not absolutely certain that the facts of existence on which logic is founded have indeed universal scope -- evident anytime, anywhere. So we must not evade them no matter what we think about lest we be out of touch. (Judging from what historicists do, namely, argue endlessly for their own views and mostly follow the laws of logic in these arguments -- certainly never ceasing to use them as they criticize their opponents and refusing to abandon them as they try to figure things out -- this might be evident to them already.22 ) I leave aside in this exploration all the concerns about objectivity and realism because my main intention is to consider whether some alternative of historicism (or pragmatism-cum-historicism) holds out any promise of setting things in better pers pective, of "not throwing out the baby with the bath water." However much there is to complain about in the various attempts to sustain an traditional (Aristotelian) idea -- to the effect that we can know the world and some of this knowledge is very gener al, true, indeed, of everything, while some of it is very particular and perhaps true only at a given time and place -- the blanket rejection expressed of the ahistoricist position in some of the writings by such thinkers as Rorty just does not help much in our attempts to understand our cognitive relationship with our existence.23 In short, the answer is not to wholly reject the realist-objectivist-universalist stance -- to deny that any belief can be such -- but to make sure it is not overstated, that it does not promise more it can deliver. The above approach, which we might call contextualism -- wherein the traditional ideals are not denied but somewhat reigned in -- should prove to be more promising than the blanket historicism we find so p opular in professional philosophy today.24 ENDNOTES: (1) Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991). (2) Ibid., p. 5. (3) See, Tibor R. Machan, Individuals and Their Rights (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Com pany, Inc., 1989), pp. 77ff. See, also, Tibor R. Machan, "Evidence of Necessary Existence," Objectivity, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 31-62. (4) How else could we even speak about distorting someone's views, misrepresenting a position, etc.? I am treating Rorty's position as a prospective objective fact of reality, so that a teacher of that view, or a critic, might be in the position to understand it correctly and thus communicate it to others accurately. It is irrelevant for my purposes here that Rorty's position is also a human artifact, as is a foundation grant. Indeed, I find the distinction between a human artifact and a natural object, so to speak, irrelevant to the basic epistemological concern of whether we can know reality as i t is. Once the artifact is produced or created, it takes its place among there rest of the furniture of the universe, as it were, and the same issues arise concerning our knowledge of it as arise about our knowing any non-artifact. (5) Ibid., p. 7. (6) Ibid., p. 9. (7) I wish to thank Randy Dipert for pointing out that "grasp" means more of a "reach for," while "grab" the achievement of that reach, so that "grab" may be more akin to what I take "know" to involve vis-a-vis the objects of knowledge. When I was about 12 I was once sitting in my seat on a train waiting to depart at the main railroad station in Budapest, Hungary. As I was looking at the people milling around outside my window, it occurred to me that these people now may have a new attribute or property, something that may have to be recorded in a very detailed biography about them, to whit, I, Tibor Machan, have taken a look at them, seen them. But then I thought, wait a minute. This may be something my biography might best recor d, namely, that I have seen these people outside the train window; but surely those people will have been left entirely unchanged by my having looked at them. Indeed, it may well be a kind of childish egocentricity that impels one to think that his or he r knowing something make a change on that thing, so that what one may know is not the thing in itself, rather the thing as known by one. Yet this leads to an infinite regress, because once one accepts this position it follows, by substitution, that not o nly has the thing in question changed by its being known by one but it will keep changing every time some additional reflection is entertained concerning it. So that not only must the people I have seen have it recorded about them that I saw them; it mus t also be recorded about them that I have reflected about my seeing them; my reflection on the fact that I have seen the people now may influence my seeing the people, which in turn influences the people differently from my merely seeing the people, etc., etc., ad infinitum. (8) Ibid., p.13. See, for his development of this trade-off, his essay "Solidarity or objectivity?" in ibid., pp. 21-34. (9) Of course the issues is not whether the words in the English tongue are made up but whether the ideas we express by these words are merely matters of some vague thing such as their usefulness to the individual person using them? But then how do we tell if they are really useful? (10) As an example, consider how readily he disparages the notion of natural human rights. (Op. cit., Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 31. His venturing into epistemological solidaritarianism has, to Rorty's mind, clear pay offs against any such individualist doctrine as natural rights, whereby individuals are supposed to have secured for them, as a matter of moral and political imperative, a sphere of personal jurisdiction that no community or solidarity may invade! One might in deed suspect the entire project to be but a clever strategy for capturing the political high ground for the Left. The problem is that the Right has thought of it a long time before the Left did. See note 13, below, for more on this point. (11) See, e.g., Richard Rorty, "Intellectuals in Politics," Dissent, Fall, 1991, pp. 483-90. (12) It is not unreasonable to hold that when East Germans used to risk life and limb by crossing the Berlin Wall so as to escape their community, they were making the requisite choices, or at least portions of them, not as members of some other community but as individuals. This points up something I note at the end of Part I of my common on Rorty, concerning the nature of our membership in community life. (13) Thus, Edmund Burke proposed that "We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank of nations and of ages." Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), p. 76. (14) For a treatment of the intellectual history of collectivist ideas, see Stephen Tonsor, "The Conservative Origins of Collectivism," in R. L. Cunningham, ed., Liberty and The Rule of Law (College, Station, TX: Texas A & M University, 1979). (15) Not as if this idea were not problematic, as I noted in Part I. (16) I single out for attention the form of historicism stated in op. cit., Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, although it is mostly labeled "pragmatism" or at times "antirepresentationalism" by Rorty and gains its designation largely by way of such negative characteristics as, for example, not having an "ahistorical criteria of rationality," etc. (p. 33n). (17) Another way of putting this is that historicism is a statement of a belief about the relationship that obtains between people forming beliefs and whatever it is about which they are forming beliefs. Historicism is, in other words, a (universalist, objectivist philosophical) belief at a certain level of reflection human beings are sometimes engaged in concerning certain general facts of reality. Of course, historicists go to torturous lengths trying to deny the charge of self-referential inconsistency. But here, again, they demonstrate by their actions that they find logic compelling enough so as to try to abide by its norms, ones that would hardly be found compelling unless the facts on which it is b ased are stable and universal. (18) On the opposite side we find all the positivists and other cognitivists, as well as absolutists, idealist, empiricists, objectivists, and others who may not share many of their various beliefs excepting that we human beings can know the world as it is and some of what we know is even universal, maybe even timeless (so generally true that it even applies to time itself). Particularly animated is the opposition coming from some of the followers of Leo Strauss. The latter has identified his m ajor adversary to be Heidegger and has openly debated the Hegelian philosopher Alexander Kojeve on the topic of historicism as far back as the 1950s. (19) Although efforts have been advanced in philosophy to circumvent such self-referential points, none of them has managed to be successful. See Steven Yates, "Self-referential Arguments," Reason Papers, No. 16 (1991). (20) Despite the fact that Rorty repeatedly faults such a desire, he himself strives, throughout the essays in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, to capture the essence of epistemology within this framework of historicism. It does not appear to occur to Rorty and those who favor his line that some cases of knowing do but others do not have a historicist form. Yet that is just what would appear to be warranted, consider that what we know itself can have a bearing on the form of ou r knowing, on what knowledge of such matters will come to, how it is most felicitously characterized. See, for more on this, the Introduction of my Individuals and Their Rights. (21) What distinguishes this approach is that no assumption is made in favor either of historicist, ahistoricist, or any other characterization of human beliefs. It is a matter of discovery, not of preconception, whether some of what we bel ieve is very generally or only circumstantially true. As to the issue of the objectivity of beliefs, I discuss this in Part I. (22) I make note of this in Tibor R. Machan, "C. S. Peirce and Absolute Truth," Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1980, pp. 153-161. (23) Such an understanding need not be final, total, timeless -- it may, nevertheless, be sound or correct. (24) Contextualism has two interpretations, one claiming that (a) "the truth of a statement is subject to some, perhaps not fully known, conditions 'in reality' (e.g., the A-B classification of blood types is true under the condition of having th e same Rh factor)" or (b) "that the truth of a statement is relative to a person's 'internal' state of knowledge at a given time." See the review of Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, by Eyal Mozes, in Full Context, published in "Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Epistemology" , Mon, 6 Jan 1992 23:01:45 EST. Mozes claims that only (a) makes sense under a correspondence theory of truth, but this is wrong. A judgment that is true may "correspond" to the f acts being judged even if it is the best available assessment of the facts in question -- that is, even if it is the best judgment we can make of what is the case for the time being. Nor is (b) concerned with "internal" (subjective) states but, rather, with up to date evidence showing that some judgment is right. Thus it is possible that while p was true in 200 B.C., stated exactly in the same way p is no longer true, even if p pertained to some general principle of physics or astronomy. If p was th e best that could be said, in light of the available evidence and rules of consistency, accuracy, and completeness, and nothing else could match it, than p could well be true. This is not the place to elaborate the conception of truth I would offer as a non-idealist substitute for the reigning (Platonist) conception. But, briefly, the idea is that "true" itself must be understood to be a developing, evolving concept that may in some contexts be applicable in a timeless fashion but in others must be take n to be temporally or historically influenced. Since to be true is a feature of judgments or statements, while what the statements are true of are facts or states of affairs (or whatever we are to call the objects of purported true judgments or statement s), truth is itself not a fixed, timeless element of reality -- in this case the reality surrounding human cognition. As to what is "best," that is a matter of the given field's standards at the time. I discuss some of these points in op. cit., Individuals and Their Rights, as well as in my doctoral dissertation, Human Rights: A Metaethical Inquiry (Ann Arbor, MI: Un iversity Microfilms, 1972) See, also, my "Epistemology and Moral Knowledge," The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 36 (September 1982), pp. 23-49. I wish to thank my colleagues at Auburn University, William Davis, Steven Yates and Kelly Jolley, and those at the U. S. Military Academy, Arthur Lambert, Ted Westhusing, and Paul Christopher, and other participants at the faculty seminar where a draf t of this paper was presented. Dicussions with Douglas Rasmussen, Mark Turiano and Gregory Johnson have also helped me to appreciate some of the issues involved. My former colleagues, Morton Schagrin, Randy Dipert and Ken Lucey were also very helpful with their critical comments on an earlier draft of this paper and I wish to thank them. Some of the ideas in this piece were inspired by Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology 2nd edition,(New York: New American Library, 1990)