The Wilson Quarterly

Is Everything Relative?

A Debate on theUnity of Knowledge

Richard Rorty's Address on Consilience

n one of the announcements of this meeting in the bulletin of the Woodrow Wilson Center it was said that I would look at Prof. Wilson's book from my post-modernist perspective. I've never quite understood what postmodernism is, but what I think that people have in mind, at least in this context, is the philosophical view that reality doesn't have a nature and that therefore truth is not an attempt to correspond to the nature of reality. This view goes back at least to Friedrich Nietzsche and William James at the beginning of the century, so postmodernism strikes me as not the right word for it -- it's a good century old. But I think it is true. So let me for a moment enlarge on the implications of that view.

Postmodernists don't say that truth is relative or socially constructed, or at least my kind of postmodernist doesn't, the pragmatist kind. We say truth is eternal, objective, absolute, and so on, but it is not one; it is a bad inference from the claim that reality is one to the claim that truth is one. There is not a particular way that the world is, there are many ways the world is, as many as there are useful human vocabularies used to describe the world. This view suggests that no area of culture -- not physics, not theology, not biology -- is privileged in the sense of being closer to reality than any other portion of culture. From the pragmatist point of view, culture is a tool kit, and we pick up various tools as needed for various purposes. None of the tools has epistemological or ontological privilege; none of them has priority over any of the others. So from a pragmatist point it is prima facie unlikely that biology, as in Professor Wilson's view, could serve as a foundational, integrative discipline.

From our point of view, statements like, "Queen Victoria died in 1901," "the Holocaust was a moral abomination," "two plus two equals four," "there are as many integers as natural numbers," and "Blake was a far greater poet than Donne," are all exactly objectively true in exactly the same sense. That is, they are worthy of belief; I would undertake to justify them. I would not expect to justify all of them to all audiences. In that sense, there is something relative, namely justification. You can't justify all claims to all audiences because different audiences have different sets of beliefs and desires. So there will never be such a thing as universal, absolute justification of any view, even though truth is and always will be eternal, objective, absolute, and all the rest of it.

So much for the general pragmatic outlook on these matters. Let me now turn to a quotation from the article that Professor Wilson published in The Wilson Quarterly. He says:

Confidence in the unity of knowledge -- universal consilience -- rests ultimately on the hypothesis that all mental activity is material in nature and occurs in a manner consistent with the causal explanations of the natural sciences. During the past several decades, that hypothesis has gained considerable support from four disciplines that succeed partially in connecting the great branches of learning [cognitive neuroscience, human behavioral genetics, evolutionary biology, and environmental science].

My own view would be that few intellectuals have questioned the claim that all mental activity is material in nature for the last couple of hundred years. The idea that there are two substances contained within human beings, an immaterial mind and a material body, has not been seriously held for quite a long time, and I don't think anything much has changed by the development of these various scientific disciplines in the last two decades.

But I don't think that anything interesting follows about consilience from the claim that all mental activity is material in nature. Consider the claim that all computer activity is mechanical in nature, as of course it is. If you want to know how computers work, you ask the computer engineer how the things are put together, what the wiring diagram is, and so on. If you want to know what to do with your computer, what programs to install in your computer, you don't ask the man who knows how the thing works, you consult other people: your advisor on the best computer games, your advisor on the best program for this and that purpose, whatever the purpose might be. To suggest that because it's all material in nature or all mechanical in nature, everything about it can be brought together in one great big unity seems to me a non sequitur. Suppose one said that because all computer activity is mechanical in nature, eventually all the programs, the computer games, the word processing programs, the Netscape browser and so on, should blend into one great program. Well, why? We have lots of programs for lots of different purposes, and there is not a chaos of computer programs. There are many and various computer programs which are tools in a tool kit. Similarly, in the academic and intellectual world there are many and various disciplines which provide various tools for use for various purposes, and I see no particular reason to think that they will all blend together in one great consilient unity, nor any reason why we should wish them to do so. As long as we have a proliferation of useful tools, I can't see what virtue there is supposed to be in synthesizing them into one great tool.

If truth were correspondence to the one true nature of reality, than perhaps there would be a point. From a pragmatist point of view, since all the disciplines produce nothing except tools, and none of them produce accurate representations of the way things are in themselves, there is no point in consilience. So I'm inclined to say that it is as doubtful that the line between the disciplines that tell you how human beings work and the disciplines that make suggestions about what to do with human beings -- the line between the natural and the social sciences and the humanities -- is being erased, or should be erased any more than the line between the hardware engineer and the software provider. There is a function for the engineer who tells you how the thing is hard-wired; there is a function for the people who produce ever new ways of putting the machine to work. It seems to me there will always be a function for the novelists, the theologians, the sociologists, the political scientists, the philosophers, who tell you new things that human beings might do with themselves and each other. That will be a different task than the task of the natural scientists who tell you how to get from our description in quantum mechanical terms to our description in molecular terms to our description in cellular terms to our description in physiological terms and so on up through evolutionary biology.

Another quotation from Prof. Wilson -- same article. He says "the linkage between genes and culture is unbreakable; culture can never have a life entirely on its own. Nor, I believe, should we wish it otherwise. Human nature is what defines our species and binds it together." Again this seems to me like saying that the link between hardware and software is unbreakable; software can never have a life entirely on its own. Well of course it can't in the sense that if you don't have a machine, there's nothing to program, so software can't get along without hard-wired metal or silicon or something. But I'm not sure we should then think there is a nature of computers, and I'm similarly not sure we should think of there being a nature of human beings. There are possible things that human beings can do: the sorts of things the Greeks did, the sorts of things the Egyptians did, the sorts of things they did in the Renaissance, the sorts of things we're doing now, the sorts of things they are described as doing in science fiction stories. Comparing and contrasting these possible things human beings can do with themselves and others seems to be of interest. Asking what the nature of this thing is that is doing all these various things strikes me as of rather little interest.

However, Professor Wilson would be right, if indeed evolutionary biology were able to set constraints on sociocultural experimentation, if we were able through the discovery of further epigenetic rules to say, "this looks like an interesting way to program ourselves (way to develop ourselves, use to make of ourselves), but it won't work because it runs up against a certain epigenetic rule." For all I know there are such rules, but I'm not going to take the sociobiological or evolutionary psychological initiative very seriously unless they produce some testable hypotheses of the form, "if you try to do so-and-so, it won't work:" if you try to nationalize the means of production, it won't work; if you try to let women into combat units in the military, it won't work; if you try to let overt homosexuals into the military, it won't work; if you try to tax the rich in order to make things better for the poor, it won't work. Until they can say, "here's something that we might plausibly think to do but biology is against (there's an epigenetic rule which will foul it up)," as one might say to a software programmer, " that sounds like a good programming idea, but it won't work because of the way the thing is hard-wired," then I think we should be dubious of the claim that we're going to get beyond rather uninteresting epigenetic rules like the ones about the incest taboo and color spaces.

The reason I think them uninteresting is that if we find a tribe living on a hitherto undiscovered island which has no incest taboo (though it doesn't have much incest either, it's just nobody cares), and has a color vocabulary and perceptual color space that just doesn't map on ours, I think our reaction would be "So what? All right, their neurons are wired up differently than ours, but, you know, live and let live." Until we get examples of epigenetic rules over which we would really be upset if they were broken, I'm not sure why we should think that biology is going to serve as a foundational discipline.

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