 Good day. It's Professor Resnick again. Today I want to discuss with you a famous philosopher. He unfortunately passed away a few years ago. His name is Richard Rorty, I-R-O-R-T-Y. He was very briefly, for years, a professor at Princeton University of Philosophy. He taught at other places as well. He was very involved in this so-called postmodern movement across the United States. And he wrote this famous book, Philosophy in the Mirror of Nature, which I signed a few pages to you. And let me just add, as far as I know it, he was no Marxist. In fact, he was not terribly happy with the Marxist approach. So for our purposes he's a non-Marxist, but his ideas are very important to the course and to this notion of over-determination that we're developing here. So let me talk a little bit about Rorty, which hopefully will help you guide your readings. Rorty sets out the traditional philosophical objective as Rorty understands it, which is the search for a foundation of truth. What philosophy and philosophers are to do is to adjudicate amongst different claims, truth claims, if you will, and provide us with a way of ascertaining what is true and what is not true. Or the philosophy and philosophers are to provide us with rules with which and by which we can go out, go around figuring out what is true and what is not true. Which theories are right, which are wrong, which rules are right, which are wrong. One of the first ideas that he discusses is what is called in philosophy the independence of the mind, the independence of thinking and experience the body. The independence or the dichotomy between the mind and the body. It's sometimes called traditionally the mind-body dualism, the thinking experience dualism. So let's take this course. Marxism is a conceptual object. You and I are knowers with our minds. So the question becomes once we assume there's an independence between Marxism, the conceptual object, and us. How do we then bridge this gap of knowledge? How do we figure out Marxism? How do we figure out what are the good ideas, what are the right ideas in Marxism? So given the independence between thinking and experience, how do we bridge this gap of knowledge? How do we figure out what is really going on outside of us in this example in this conceptual object, Marxism? So wordy discusses that dichotomy, but he also discusses philosophers outside the Marxian tradition who discard this presumed independence between thinking and experience. Don't forget it's a presumed, it's an assumption by philosophers between, once again, thinking and experience. There's no experience these philosophers claim. I'm sorry, let me do that again, that was wrong. There's no independence these philosophers claim because thinking and experience, experience, complexly cause one another. That's consistent with what we did the previous time when we discussed over determination. Everything is both cause and effect. Each depends upon the other for its very existence. Now in Marxism, there is a parallel attempt by some Marxists in the history of the tradition to also reject the independence between thinking and experience. Wordy pays no attention to them because as I mentioned to you, he's not interested really in Marxism and he doesn't think that Marxists are capable of making this kind of argument. But in your reading, it's one of the reasons it's assigned to you in knowledge and class. There are attempts by Lukacs, Gramsci, Althusser, Hindus and Hurst, and others mentioned there, Lenin I believe is mentioned there, who also in one way or the other reject the independence between the two. So it's kind of interesting that outside the Marxian tradition and the traditional philosophical discourse of the non-Marxian tradition, there is a rejection of the independence and within the Marxian tradition, there's also this kind of rejection, although the people often don't talk to one another. Wordy claims that empiricism and rationalism, once again those are our two traditional epistemologies, are theories that attempt to, to quote Wordy, escape from history. Very, very nice phrasing. I want to examine that important claim because it connects to many things we're going to discuss and many of the things on your reading. First, both empiricism and rationalism assert in common that there is an absolute truth outside of us to be discovered or to be revealed to us, typically revealed by thought, discovered by experience. Now, what's this truth that is asserted to be out there? Well, truth is independent of history. That's the definition of what is truth. It's something which is independent of our political history, our cultural history, our natural history, our independent of our social history. And let me just add, because Wordy doesn't, it's also independent from the Marxian perspective of our class history. Truth doesn't depend. It's not socially contrived. It's outside of us. Okay? So it has an a, let me use different words. It has a, truth has a prior independent existence to any knower or to the community of knowers. It's independent of us. There's our dichotomy again. There's the assumed dualism of rationalism and empiricism. Well, if the truth is outside of us, how do we get it? And the answer is that we need some kind of standard, some kind of way to ascertain that which is outside of us, that, you know, to figure out what is true. And that standard that we have to use has to be neutral. It has to be intrinsically accurate. It has to be independent of us as knowers, so that we can have full confidence that we are gaining knowledge that is valid. Okay? Empiricism offers its standard, which is that of experience. So experience is the way, the standard, that we can bridge that gap and figure out what is true and what is not true. Rationalism offers a different standard. Rationalism offers a reason as the bridge to knowledge, that which we can be confident in, which can intrinsically true and accurate, so that we can figure out what's going on. Notice that these rationalism and empiricism are offering two different standards. They both believe in a standard, but two different ones, and hence they've been arguing about another for thousands of years. Rorty, he says, and he's very provocative, he says, there's no such thing as an absolute truth to be found. All theories which include rationalism and empiricism themselves as theories of knowledge, all theories only produce claims about the truth. So all we have are different truth claims emanating from different theories, which are relative to different knowers, which are relative to different societies, so all we have, according to Rorty, are relative truths. What we don't have is what we do not have, according to him, is absolute truth, so that's a counterclaim to what the rationalists and the empiricists have. According to Rorty, there's no standard that we can use, which is intrinsically true, accurate, independent of us, that we can close that gap. The reason there's no standard, because all standards are over-determined. In terms of rationalism and empiricism, the logic is that he says to the empiricists, you can't use your standard of experiences, because experience is, if you want, corrupted, is shaped by thought, and he says to the rationalists, rationalists, you can't use that. That's not independent of our experience. Our political, economic, cultural experiences shape how we think, just like we argued before, that Marx's thinking and Marx's experiences were complexly shaped by each other. They're not independent, hence there's no standard. So a problem occurs, which is, assuming Rorty is right, or assuming if you want, this notion of over-determination is right, a problem occurs when a particular claim about the world is turned into, magically, the world. That's what rationalists and empiricists do, according to Rorty. In other words, what rationalists and empiricists do is take a particular claim about the world, or theoreticians in general, when they deploy rationalism and empiricism. They take their interesting and fascinating claim about the world, and turn it magically into the world. It's no longer a relative truth, it becomes the absolute truth. But what they've done, according to Rorty, is merely take in their idea about the world, their claim, their truth claim, and turned it into the world, that they're making an idea into the world. The consequence of that, and I told you we're going to worry about the consequence of epistemology, is that somebody's idea of the world becomes the world, and everybody else's ideas then have to conform to somebody's idea of the world. Wow. Rather than having different truth claims competing with one another, what we have now is that a person's idea of the world, magically turned into the world, to the truth, enables that person to use his or her truth as the standard, with which and against which everybody else's claim about the world, ideas, are to be tested. So, someone's ideas of the world have become the standard, the absolute truth, against which all other theories are to be tested, to see if they conform correctly, or come close to that particular idea. And we're going to see, and I'm going to mention to you, that a person, another philosopher in the 20th century is going to talk about this, his name was Foucault, F-O-U-C-A-U-L-T. Dialectical materialism, or over-determination, claims there is no such standard of truth that exists or could ever exist. Experience is thought to shape our ideas, and our ideas are thought to shape our experiences. In other words, they only exist in relationship to one another. Neither one is independent of the other, and hence, neither one can be a standard of the other. Don't forget what a standard is. It's something which is immune from causation. And so, what dialectical materialism is claiming, and rarity is claiming, there is no such thing in the world. There is nothing in the world, whether it be experience, or thought, or anything else, which is immune from causation. Everything is over-determined, and hence, nothing can be that kind of standard. So what we have then are a variety of different truth claims, which includes Marx's notion of class exploitation. That's the first lecture. So that's a particular claim about the world, which competes and contends with other claims about the world, and that's all we have. We have these different truth claims. So you can see what's happened here. There is now a space created for Marxism, this thing that intrigues people, but also makes them very fearful, that strikes this open nerve in society. And Marxism now has kind of elevated its status through this kind of argument. It becomes just another claim about the world, and there's no way to demote that particular claim unless you deploy this kind of magical step. So what I want to do next time is explore this epistemological argument, and talk a bit more about the consequences of it, and come back to this philosopher Foucault. Thank you.