Oh those conversations in the eighties and nineties. You could hear Richard Rorty quoted ("Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences") in half the disciplines in the humanities. In the English Department the appeals were to Jacques Derrida ("There are only differences") and Chaim Perelman ("There are only audiences") — in addition to Rorty. Imply a claim for objective truth and you'd get one of them. Then you're in a troubling philosophical argument — and all you wanted to do, usually, was clear up a few problems in the Interpretation of Poetry course.
Get into trouble often enough and you'll figure out a way to get out. Here's my way. Say you're a scientist. You're accused of believing in the existence of a real world that can be objectively known. You say, "No, I just believe in the existence of a group of people who call each other 'scientists.' I take 'scientist' to be a compliment-word and I want them to apply it to me.
"What do I do to get the compliment? The same things I have been doing to discover objective reality. I examine nature, declare what I have discovered in a journal, and wait for the compliment. If readers of the journal, replicating my examination, get the same results I got I get the compliment. They were persuaded. That's all I'm doing, persuading people. Just as Aristotle's orator did.
"Except that there's a difference in our audiences. Mine isn't persuaded until the needles on their dials are in the same place I reported my needles to be. There's my rhetoric. When I work day and night in my lab I don't say I'm seeking the truth about the world, I say I'm working on a speech, the only kind that will persuade these people."
The scientist has something quieting to say, then, to each relativist. To Rorty: "With 'scientist' I merely take your compliment a step further, from sentence to sentence-maker." To Derrida: "I too deal only in difference; here it's the difference between language that gets me the compliment and language that doesn't." To Perelman: "I never go beyond the needs of my audience."
That's a scientist's response but it's not so different from mine. In my poetry class my audience needs reports on how English speakers form sentences and give meanings to words. Those reports they get from me, drawing on grammar book and dictionary. Without them they, with relatively little experience in the reading of English, can't construe sentences, the first operation in the reading of a poem.
It's to satisfy this need that I try to keep relativists quiet. Half my work is the work of a scientist, providing reports which, if believed, will allow my audience to proceed to the really rewarding part of their work, letting their imaginations go where the poet points them. In the first half of the job relativistic statements of the type we heard in the last century, are inadmissible. They are admissible in the second half, where differences in what's imagined are all the fun.
Keeping the two straight is one of the hardest jobs in the English classroom, if not in all of the humanities. You can convince beginning students — natural, self-protecting subjectivists — that scientific standards govern part of poetry-reading but it takes a lot of class time. Quarters are too short, life is too short, to allow relativists to lengthen it.
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