This short book contains a preface, eight essays, and fifty-nine pages of notes. Earlier versions of the preface and some of the essays have already been published elsewhere. The topic is the “contemporary intellectual controversy” between those who uphold a theory dubbed traditional or classical objectivism and those described variously as progressives, relativists, deconstructionists, constructivists, or postmodernists. (In order to save space I will usually call this group relativists or postmodernists).

Objectivism affirms the possibility of truth, reason, and knowledge in philosophy, science, and history. Postmodernism denies, in one way or another, either the existence or the possibility of truth, reason, and knowledge. The author, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, sides with the postmodernists, mainly, I think, because she believes they are in the swim; thus she states that those who support postmodernism include “prize-winning theoretical biologists, esteemed neurophysiologists, accomplished computer engineers, and established historians and philosophers of science,” as well as the dozens of American academics referred to in her notes.

In the first chapter, “The Unquiet Judge,” Smith tries to rebut the accusation that relativist views on truth etc. entail political and social quietism. Her arguments are as follows. First she equates quietism with positivist support of the status quo (a move borrowed, perhaps unconsciously, from Marxism, which interestingly enough employs the expression objective support in this context); then she points out that objectivists (not a misprint) can be right-wing as well as left-wing; and then she bluntly asserts that objectivism is “empty and obscurantist.” These propositions cannot show that relativism does not entail quietism.

Two further themes appear (and reappear in later chapters). One is the thesis that differences of opinion should never be seen in terms of the true/false dichotomy but always as products of personal histories. However, an opinion’s having an origin is not incompatible with its having a truth-value. Smith is scornful of what she calls the traditional or “logicist” true/false dichotomy but doesn’t mind introducing fake dichotomies like that between opinions as truth-bearers and opinions as products. The second thesis is that relativists can and do engage in arguments about political and social questions. I will say more about this later.

In Chapter 2, “Making (Up) the Truth,” Smith sets out to defend constructivism, the view that truth, knowledge, and reason are creations of human minds and differ from mind to mind. Her defense lies in bluntly asserting that “contemporary reconceptions of classic ideas of truth and knowledge … effectively challenge the authority of traditional explanations.” Unfortunately, the content of the challenge remains unstated. Smith herself does not say what the challenge consists of, and on page 23 she writes, “I shall not attempt to describe here the work of individual constructivists nor will I be discussing in any detail their characteristic investigations, analyses and arguments.” In the notes, she mentions many books and articles by postmodernist authors, and there and elsewhere she conscripts a ragbag of big names to the cause. These include Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, Thomas Kuhn, J. L. Austin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. But it would be silly for a reader to feel challenged by a list of names and titles.

Chapter 3, “Belief and Resistance, a Symmetrical Account,” is about the psychology of persuasion, here called “the analysis of the microdynamics and macrodynamics of belief.” In spite of its title, the chapter is not symmetrical; symmetry is one of its topics, and Smith treats it as an important philosophical discovery. Like some ancient Greek mouthing “All is mud,” she insists that symmetry is everywhere. Thus, if two people agree, then that is a symmetry; if they disagree, that’s another symmetry; and, of course, there must be a third symmetry between the two symmetries. When seemingly strong evidence turns out to be weak, that’s a symmetry; when weak evidence turns out to be strong, that’s another; and again we find a super-symmetry between the symmetries. What of asymmetry? Well, “from another point of view,” an asymmetry is actually a kind of symmetry …

Chapter 4, “Doing Without Meaning,” reproduces a popular version of Derrida’s “deconstruction” of language and his ideas about “the slippage of meaning.”

Chapters 5, 6, and 7 are the most intriguing because in them the author makes serious attempts to rebut the arguments of her opponents. The rebuttals fail for reasons that are comparatively simple but quite interesting. In chapter 5, “Unloading the Self-Refutation Charge,” Smith defends Protagoras’s relativistic thesis “man is the measure of all things” and tries to rebut arguments (“tricks”) attributed to Plato and his commentator Myles Burnyeat. In “The Skeptic’s Turn” (6) and “Arguing with Reason” (7) she repeats part of her attempted rebuttal but directs it at different opponents, one of whom is Jurgen Habermas.

Here is how the first part of her rebuttal runs. She agrees that “relativism is always (i.e., non-relatively) true” is self-refuting but says that it is not what relativists really mean. She looks at a supposed parallel: “all generalizations are false” is self-refuting but what is really meant is “most generalizations have exceptions,” which is perfectly all right. What then does the relativist really mean? Smith suggests that he really means “it appears to me that relativism is always true” (italics hers). Although this revised version is not self-refuting (as far as I can see), it still won’t do. Why not? Because what seems to be the case to the speaker is also believed by her to be self-refuting. That’s to say, the revised version, when stated in full, is “it appears to me that relativism is always true, i.e., that that self-refuting statement is always true.hus, it’s an example of the well-known paradox “I believe p and p is false,” sometimes called Moore’s Paradox after G. E. Moore.

In another attempted rebuttal, Habermas and others are accused of repeatedly assuming what is to be proven, or begging the question. Begging the question is a term of traditional logic (“logicism”), so it is not surprising that Smith doesn’t really know how to handle it. Habermas and others hold that the relativist’s own speech acts (performances) depend on the essential nature of assertion. For instance, the relativist cannot make her points against the objectivist unless she surreptitiously accepts the rules of logic and the true/false dichotomy. According to Habermas, as quoted and then paraphrased by Smith, these considerations “revive the transcendental mode of justification” and provide objective theories with “a non-deductive but inescapable mode of proof.” Smith raises no objections to the idea that the suggested mode of proof is non-deductive but insists that it is not inescapable. It is not inescapable because (she thinks) it can be shown to beg the question.

Now, begging the question (“p, therefore p”), though useless, is certainly deductively valid. And no argument can be deductively valid and also not deductively valid. So no argument can both beg the question and also fail to be deductively valid. So if Habermas and others have indeed produced a non-deductive mode of proof they most certainly have not begged any questions. Moreover, contra Smith, there can be no infinite regress of question-begging once the first accusation of that error falls to the ground.

Another rebuttal goes like this. It is said that the relativist’s own speech acts depend on the very logical norms she thinks she is rejecting; she has to employ and appeal to these norms while trying to deny they exist. Smith accepts that in seeking to expose the wrongness of traditional logic the relativist does indeed assume certain logical norms. But (she says) her assumption is different from the assumptions made by her opponents. Both sides “… assume, in the sense of appeal to, pretty much the same logical rules [but they] conceptualize those rules and their operation in radically different ways … more or less same rules, more or less same uses, radically different conceptualizations… .” (italics mine).

What does this mean? I take it to mean that people can use the same rules and yet have different opinions about the status of those rules. What then is the status of logic according to the relativist? Ms. Smith tells us many times that her opponents’ views on the matter are “contestable” and “contested” but gives no positive account of her own. Then again, the ownership of a “radically different conceptualization” doesn’t amount to much if it makes no difference to the rules one uses. It’s just a bit of pointless decoration. The vague qualifications (“pretty much the same,” “more or less the same”) are also pointless. Unless the point is to pull some wool over the eyes of the readers.

Smith claims that a belief in objectivity results from merely optional ways of using language. Traditional education trains students in an optional “logicism” involving the idea that assertion does not normally have to be qualified: but people can also be taught how to write and debate using the linguistic conventions of relativistic postmodernism in which every statement is qualified (or assumed to be).

That postmodernist linguistic conventions can be taught is indeed true; perhaps Smith herself was taught them when a college student. Nevertheless being taught how to speak a postmodernist version of one’s native tongue is not like learning ordinary informal logic. Ordinary informal logic, the language of objective truth and falsehood, is not taught in the academies but absorbed in childhood. It is absorbed as the child learns how to cope with reality; with parents and siblings and pets, with standing up and falling over, with roads and sidewalks, with food and drink, with fire; and later with items like money, and timetables, and friendship, and enmity, and so on. The word assertion isn’t a piece of verbal elastic which can be given any old rubbery postmodernist sense; au contraire, it denotes a human activity which meshes with all our other activities. That is the nature of assertion, and it helps to explain why the linguistic conventions of relativism do not and cannot mesh with other human activities. College students can be taught to talk in a postmodern manner, but they cannot be taught to live in ways that would accord with that language, those supposed beliefs. They cannot be taught to behave as relativists or constructivists or Derrideans.

Why not? Well, to begin with, in the conversations of ordinary life you can’t keep qualifying everything you say. Qualifications like “I think so but you might not” deny responsibility for the reliability of what is said, and sooner or later, in real life, responsibility has to be accepted. Sooner or later, in real life, “I think so” has to be followed by “but let’s find out for sure.” Then again, a professor can happily deliver lectures all about the “the slippage of meaning” and the impossibility of truth and knowledge, but, when she leaves the classroom and pins up a reading list, or signs a contract, or writes to a publisher, or orders a meal, or chooses between pills marked “aspirin” and bottles marked “arsenic,” or performs any one of a million other everyday actions, she is forced to rely on the non-slippage of meaning, on the contents of assertions and on the nature of assertion as such. She can do no other: in the real world her projects (and in some cases even her safety) will depend on the truth and reliability of what she hears and reads and signs and says.

Let’s return to the question as to whether relativists can engage in intellectual debate. They do; but can they? And how can they? Smith’s own debating moves are instructive because they show that objectivism is unavoidable.

It is well known that, when Mao Tse-tung tried to abolish the concept of moral obligation, he introduced the idea of political correctness as a kind of substitute. The notion of political correctness soon acquired all the force of moral obligation (and more—old-style immorality didn’t lead straight to the concentration camp). Somewhat similarly, Smith rejects the words true and false but surreptitiously retains the concepts by embodying them in a substitute terminology. She replaces the word true with: valid, effective, coherent, relevant, sensitive, progressive, accurate, serviceable, conceptually congenial (I just love “conceptually congenial”). For the word false we get: confused, empty, dubious, doubtful, tendentious, contestable, and inaccurate. Admittedly, the substitutes are used in a pretty cloudy way but it’s worth remembering that if they are to be defined at all, then some of them—the words accurate, inaccurate, and valid, for instance—can, and must, be defined in terms of truth and falsity.

Smith tells us that, when relativists engage in debate and try to effect change, they do so by “giving evidence of the undesirable results of status quo practices … pointing out the probable results of reform … pointing out that [their] analyses are relevant to the listener’s experience” (italics mine) and by appealing to the listener’s self-interest. But these are arguments of a kind that might easily be produced by an objectivist utilitarian philosopher—a rather worldly one. Smith also tells us about the way she thinks relativists would deal with propaganda which denies the Holocaust. They would engage in  

… the gathering, analysis, labeling and public exhibition of original documents and photographs, the development and public dissemination of vivid narratives incorporating exact descriptions of circumstantial details, the production, citation and credentialing of survivors and other participants … [italics mine].

But these activities are typical of ordinary objective historical research. True, they have been dollied up a bit in Smith’s account, no doubt because she lives in the cultural world recommended by Richard Rorty, a world of TV docudramas. Note, though, that she wants all the docudramas and exhibitions to be exact, and detailed, and based on physical evidence and on the statements of “credentialized” (i.e., genuine) witnesses whose “citations” (i.e., assertions) can be trusted.

Professor Smith says absurd things about philosophical objectivists. They are represented as angry, depressed, frightened, perplexed, driven to awful self-doubt, and struck down by a weird new kind of mania. Who are these people? Some are figments of the imagination, the straw men of classical logic; others are naked because Smith has surreptitiously stolen their clothes.