JERRY
L.
MARTIN
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tivist thinking are fairly easy to refute (and were indeed refuted long be–
fore Jacques Derrida) , transformationists end up refuting positions no one
holds - heroically jousting at windmills that have already been knocked
down - and declaring an easy triumph over Western rationalism without
bothering to examine the more credible and sophisticated forms of ob–
jectivism. When they do pay enough attention to recent epistemology
to note that most philosophers are neither Cartesian rationalists nor
positivists, transformationists sometimes leap
to
the conclusion that these
philosophers must agree with their own relativism.
Caricaturing objectivism, transformationists achieve easy triumphs
over phantom opponents. Metaphysical realists do not , for example,
hold or need to hold that there is a single, definitive description of real–
ity or anything close to it. All they hold or need to hold is that, of the
various descriptions of reality, we can say that some are true or more ad–
equate than others, and that reality, and not merely what we say about
it, has a role in determining truth and adequacy. Many forms of realism
fully acknowledge that mind, language, or conceptual frameworks make
a contribution to knowledge. If we did not have the concept of a
"key," we could not ask whether one was in the drawer. But having the
concept, we can ask, and the answer wi ll be in the drawer, not in our
concepts. There are many ways to analyze the relation between what is
in our minds and what is in the world, but none of them is as simple–
minded as the simplistic realism attacked by transformationists.
Most objectivists hold that we understand the world by applying our
concepts to the facts of experience. Objectivists understand that there is
considerable latitude within a conceptual framework for arranging facts
to fit the framework, for positing epicycles on top of epicycles, as the
late followers of Ptolemaic astronomy did, to make the theory consistent
with the facts. But objectivists also understand, as transformationists seem
not to, that sometimes facts finally overwhelm conceptual frameworks.
Otherwise, there wou ld never be the anomalies that , according to Kuhn,
lead
to
conceptual change. Facts may be theory-dependent, but theories
are also fact-dependent.
The transformationist form of solipsism - that we are all trapped
within our interpretive communities - is in some ways less persuasive than
classic solipsism. It is odd to believe that individuals can get outside their
own minds but not outside the beliefs of the groups of which they are
members: if a person can make one leap, why not the other? Moreover,
people seem to be able to challenge their groups' norms , change them,
leave one group for another, describe and criticize them with a distance
unimaginable if group relativism were right. It has been possible, for ex–
ample, for people steeped in a culture that regarded African-Americans as
less than human, to have experiences of African-Americans that refuted
