A New Look at the Left Wing

Finally, I also think we have to ask ourselves what kind of practices would follow if we accepted Barnes’ and Rorty’s arguments. One line of critique is that such views are critically disabling… Rorty’s favoured ironists cannot present descriptions of society as empowering or emancipating by claiming they reveal real structures of oppression or injustice. Yet emancipation in real social systems may clearly require more than redescription; it may require the transformation of real and enduring social structures whose mechanisms of oppression need to be accurately identified.

Even worse, it has been suggested, Rorty’s voluntarism encourages fleeting paradigm shifts and exotic redescriptions which are largely judged on aesthetic grounds. To Bhaskar (1985: 134–35), Rorty’s project smacks of ‘an ideology for a leisured elite … neither racked by pain nor immersed in toil – whose lives may be devoted to the practice of aesthetic enhancement’. Even more harshly, Haack (1994: 139) warns, ‘there would be no honest intellectual work in Rorty’s post-epistemological utopia’.

The underlying argument then is that critique and emancipation would seem to require some element of philosophical realism as a basis. The identification of real structures, powers and tendencies is necessary to enable us to uncover ideological distortions and forms of domination, and to carry out thought experiments to explore the possibility of different, and better, social organizations.

In epistemology it can too often seem as if a concern with truth and rationality were wholly disconnected from any concern with power and the social identities of the participants in epistemic practices. For the most part the tradition provides us with a clinically asocial conception of the knowing subject, with the result that epistemology tends to proceed as if socio-political considerations were utterly irrelevant to it. At the other extreme, there are many ‘end-of-epistemology’ and postmodernist theories (treated as either occult tendency or as the new orthodoxy, depending on the company one keeps) who tell us to abandon reason and truth as universal norms on the grounds that they are mere functions of power as it is played out in the drama of epistemic practice. Whereas on the the traditionalist view social power is seen as irrelevant to the rational, on the postmodernist view reason tends to be reduced to social power. One might venture a diagnosis: that both the traditionalist and reductivist camps make the same mistake of thinking it is an all or nothing situation, so that if social power is involved in rational proceedings in any but the must superficial of ways, then it is all up with rationality.

…These characterizations of traditionalist and reductivist extremes are somewhat artificial, of course, although I think they are not quite caricatures. They serve to delineate two contrasting and equally mistaken conceptions of how rational authority and social power are related. I shall present a different conception of the relation, which explains, firstly, why socio-political matters are a proper concern in epistemology; and, secondly, why the very possibility of bringing a politicized critical perspective to bear requires that rational authority and social power be firmly distinguished.