97. Meet My Philosopher, the Smothers Brother.

J. L. Austin, the Oxford linguistic philosopher, said that we could call oversimplification the occupational disease of philosophers, "were it not their occupation." If that's fair then it's certainly fair for us followers of philosophers to oversimplify each other's positions as taken, say, at a party. The test is personal convenience. "Does the simplification," you ask, "prepare me sufficiently for the next, possibly more serious, encounter? Can I now move on to the next guest?"

I once found it convenient to classify all new academic acquaintances simply as either a Tom or a Dick, following this exchange in the old Smothers Brothers act:

Dick: Your shirttail's out.

Tom: Why do you hate me?

If I identify a Dick I bone up on British philosophy, if a Tom, French philosophy. In one case I'm ready for empiricists, logicians, and hard scientists; in the other I'm ready for phenomenologists, existentialists, and soft scientists, especially psychologists.

Who will I welcome alongside me? That depends on where I am. If I'm in a neighborhood where they break your knuckles if they catch you with your shirttail out I welcome Dick. If I'm at home unconsciously picking on a playmate I welcome Tom. In operating rooms and cockpits it's always Dick; in psychiatrist's offices and confessionals it's always Tom.

There are times when I will positively love Dick. When rumors are flying, when a mob is forming, when a lynching or a pogrom is imminent oh how great it is to have him appear and ask, "Did the provocative event really happen?" When it's a provocation to war — Tonkin Gulf, weapons of mass destruction — it's even greater. Facts. Caring about facts. At last somebody. I could hug him.

But Tom can be helpful too. When I'm listening to a politician, watching commercials, or reading a government-controlled newspaper, I love to hear his voice, "No, what he's really saying is 'Hate this, love that, trust these.'" Tom shows you what a fool you were to concentrate on the shirttail. Those guys were just using it. You've got to love somebody who can take apart propaganda the way Tom does.

The trouble is, Tom and Dick don't get along. Dick thinks he means what he says. He hates to hear "what you really mean." He delights in pointing out the number of places where Tom's philosophers will find themselves with broken knuckles. Tom delights in showing Dick how helpless his philosophers will be before a poem or a subtle philosophy.

I need Dick more than I need Tom simply because I spend more time making my way through the world than I do reading poetry or philosophy. I'd like to trust Tom but I need to trust Dick — as all the scientists, all the physicians I go to, needed to trust him. I can't live without him.

Tom's philosophers weaken my trust in Dick by showing me that he doesn't deserve to be so positive about the "real" world he thinks he's talking about. That world, they say, is just a humanly represented one, and even the representation Dick is surest of is subject to an "uncertainty principle," or an "incompleteness theorem," or its "relativity."

Dick's own philosophers weaken my trust in him by showing me how imperfect his theoretical foundation is. His empiricism proceeds from unexamined dogma and his given, the stuff he gets from his senses, is, they say, largely a myth.

Why should I let criticism from either side weaken my trust in Dick? I don't need a perfect epistemology. I can make my way through the world very well with the epistemology that stood for a long time before Derrida or Rorty or Kuhn revealed its imperfections, or Einstein, or Gödel, or Heisenberg were available to quote.

The old epistemology is not hard to learn, but it is hard to stick to. You don't always notice mistakes, even if you're willing to call them "mistakes." If you have a friend that notices, though, somebody to tell you when your shirttail is out, it's a lot easier. You just have to trust him, even when he doesn't sound like your friend.

73. Attention to Words as a Response to Relativism

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.