Personal

Well, I guess I should just lay it all on the line here. This is personal to me. (I'm the person writing it, see?) It bothers me a good deal that I do not understand these people, Thomas Kuhn, Bernard Bailyn and Richard Rorty, three of my favorite scholars. 

Last night, I had a thought, I don't know what brought it to mind this time, I had had the thought before: Bailyn and Kuhn were saying the same thing about the subjects of their most important works. A Bailyn-Kuhn linkage makes perfect sense, both got their ideas at Harvard and their major works were published within five years of one another. But on another occasion I had done a google search, "bailyn kuhn" and all permutations, and there was none! (that anybody had previously recognized). 

As I reviewed in my mind last night what they had written I decided to write this post. Then when I sat down I added Rorty in. He was saying the same thing as the first two. But I couldn't find Mirror of Nature on my bookshelf for quite awhile. So I started internet searching. Then I found the book but the index was unhelpful. Then I did more internet research and found that what I was looking for was in Truth and Progress, another book I have but could not find. I finally found the passage in another annoyed bout of internet research.

It has always bothered me that I loved Structure of Scientific Revolutions and everything I have read by Rorty 99% but that then there was this "anomaly" that I couldn't get past and which colored for me all of their works. With Bailyn I was disturbed by 99% of Ideological Origins. I don't want to state my botheration before quoting their words. First, here is Kuhn and I will number the passages as K-1, B-1, R-1, etc.

K-1: When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer...then you may find that...central passages... have changed their meaning. (Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension (1977))

K-2: What Aristotle could be saying baffled me at first, until—and I remember the point vividly—I suddenly broke in and found a way to understand it, a way which made Aristotle’s philosophy make sense.

K-3: What I discovered in studying Aristotle was that a text required interpretation. And by interpretation I mean something similar to... hermeneutics but without all the claims of hermeneutics as a way to Truth. It was a way of reading texts, of looking for things that don’t quite fit, puzzling over them, and then suddenly finding a way of sorting out the pieces.

K-4:...we read Kelvin or Maxwell or Galileo or whoever, closely, and tried to figure out how those people could ever have said the sorts of things they said.

K-5: We asked, “Why would he say that?” We found things that didn’t make sense, and tried to find a way of reading that would make it make sense.

Bailyn:

B-1: And I found myself viewing these origins with surprise, for the "interior" view, from the vantage point of the pamphlets, was different from what I had expected.
...

B-2: Study of the pamphlets...posed a variety of new problems of interpretation.

B-3: I began to see a new meaning in phrases that I, like most historians, had readily dismissed as mere rhetoric and propaganda: "slavery," "corruption," "conspiracy."

B-4: These inflammatory words were used so forcefully...by writers of so great a variety of social statuses, political positions and religious persuasions...and they reflected so clearly the realities of life...in which the fear of conspiracy...was built into the very structure of politics, that I began to suspect that they meant something very real to both...writers and...readers: that there were real fears, real anxieties, a sense of real danger behind these phrases...The more I read, the less useful, it seemed to me, was the whole idea of propaganda in its modern meaning when applied to the writings of the American Revolution...

Rorty:

 R-1: Pragmatists need not deny that true sentences are always true (as I have, unhappily, suggested in the past that they might ...Stout...rightly rebukes me for these suggestions, and says that pragmatists should agree with everybody else that 'Slavery is absolutely wrong' has always been true - even in periods when this sentence would have sounded crazy to everybody concerned, even the slaves (who hoped that their fellow-tribespeople would return in force and enslave their present masters). All that pragmatists need is the claim that this sentence is not made true by something other than the beliefs which we would use to support it - and, in particular, not by something like The Nature of Human Beings.

There are their words, here is my botheration. As a foundational matter, in K-1, why should we go to all the trouble? Not a point born of fatigue although I am getting tired. It's a "pragmatic" question: What is the "cash value" of understanding what Aristotle really meant 2,000 years later? Along the same beside-the-point line, it occurred to me as I was re-reading Kuhn, I made a note on it: "Stockholm Syndrome." My thought was that Kuhn had to defend Aristotle because Aristotle could not be stupid. He became captive of Aristotle (and "Kelvin or Maxwell or Galileo") and then identified with his captor. And that was when my thinking crystalized. These guys don't want to say even that their heroes were wrong! Look, they made great advances but time has proved them wrong on fundamental points. Why can't they say that? Why do they have to go through the contortions of  "When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities" and make sense of them (damn it!) ? NO! They were absurd, that's how I make sense of them.

K-3: Professor Kuhn, God rest his soul, LOVES "hermeneutics" except "hermeneutics as a way to Truth." Why, Professor Kuhn? You believe in "Truth," I know you do (or did)! Is it the "claim" of one method as the only path to Truth? I think he would answer that yes. That’s a straw man argument. What hermenoot makes that claim for hermeneutics? It's the claim of a method and the Truth, singular, isn't it? I'M NOT FINDING YOU OUT, PROFESSOR KUHN. THERE ARE DIFFERENT TRUTHS! I AGREE.

I had this ungenerous, troglodyte thinking with 99% of Bailyn. I swear to you I have read every goddamned sentence of Ideological Origins, many sentences many times, and Bailyn is just WRONG! It's not a matter of a new "interior" "interpretation" of the pamphlets, THE AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARIES WERE PARANOID SCHIZOPHRENICS!, or would be so diagnosed today. There was no "interior" reality, it was all unreal! There was NO conspiracy by Great Britain to "ENSLAVE" the British settlers of North America. NONE! It was disturbed thought. 

B-3 No, Professor Bailyn, God rest his soul, you did not see a "new meaning" in the term "slavery". It's the same one; always meant the same thing. If people read you as closely as they did Professor Rorty (R.I.P) you would have had a shitstorm descend on your head that would have made what hit Rorty a freshening spring sprinkle. Bailyn fell captive to the Revolutionaries as Kuhn did his heroes. In previous posts I could see in my mind's eye Bailyn about to crack up, staring out the window of his home or office and thinking "WTF?! I can't write this! How can I write that the foundational literature of the American Revolution was bat shit crazy?" So he didn't and wrote it the way that he did and the accolades and awards and anniversary editions poured in and he lived and died a happy man.

Why can't they call a spade a spade? That's what I thought over and over again.

Rorty. Yes, Professor, you did “suggest” many, MANY times that truth is contingent. And you were RIGHT many, many times. Just not all the time. 

Dear pageviewer, you're smarter than me, read R-1 again and explain it to me. Does Professor Rorty write that he, and pragmatists for whom he speaks, affirm that "Slavery is absolutely wrong has always been true"? HE DOES NOT. What he says is that, counter-historically, any pragmatist who wished to so affirm could do so, etc.? And what does the etc. mean? "All that pragmatists need is the claim that this sentence is not made true by something other than the beliefs which we would use to support it..." That's gobbledy-gook. Beliefs are time-bound, Rorty makes that point over and over again and it is a statement that is undeniable! No, that is not an explanation, it is verbiage to cover the last part of that sentence: Rorty does not want to, cannot, affirm the normative, "Slavery is absolutely wrong has always been true", because it's not true by practice; he would have to acknowledge the existence of MORALITY. The following by a Rorty critic on this point is the last word:

When we say things such as 'slavery is wrong,' do we mean by that 'we don't do that around here,' or do we mean something which isn't tied in this way to our current social practices? ...

I am altering Professor Will Kymlicka‘s example because “sexual discrimination” is too squishy for me.

When a Muslim woman in Egypt the Democratic Republic of Congo says 'sexual discrimination rape is wrong' she does not mean 'we don't do that around here.' On the contrary, she is saying that precisely because it is done there, and always has been done...She is saying 'discrimination rape is wrong, although it is approved around here. Now if Rorty was right about what moral language meant, then she would be contradicting herself. She'd be saying 'we don't do that around here, although we do do that around here.' But of course we can make sense of her claim-- we know exactly what she means. So it's just not true that when we say 'X is wrong,' we mean 'we don't do X around here.