Truth and Consequences: Intentions, Conventions, and the New Thematics (review)

Truth and Consequences: Intentions, Conventions, and the New Thematics by Reed Way Dasenbrock. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Pp. 330+xvii. $65.00 cloth. $25.00 paper.

Dasenbrock's book is, primarily, a critique of relativism--or "conventionalism," the doctrine that our interpretations and evaluations are determined by social conventions which we cannot escape. Conventionalism is, in Dasenbrock's view, the dominant critical ideology today. He finds it conceptually incoherent and often bound up with rhetorical practices that are detrimental to productive intellectual discussion. Against this, Dasenbrock uses recent analytic philosophy to defend a form of intentionalism.

Given the confluence of our interests and attitudes on these topics (down to our shared admiration for the work of my former teacher, Donald Davidson), I expected to enjoy and admire Dasenbrock's book. To some extent, I did. First, Dasenbrock has read extensively in analytic philosophy, especially Davidson. His book is likely to introduce new readers to this rich tradition.

Second, Dasenbrock neatly isolates and defines conventionalism. The tendencies he refers to are more or less the same as those commonly termed "relativist." However, Dasenbrock's term, and his definition, are more apt. They help to clarify the issues at stake. Also, he lucidly reiterates some of the standard arguments against relativism, now transferred to conventionalism. He explains why claims that truth is relative to a paradigm or an interpretive community are self-undermining. When an official document of the ACLS critiques "claims of . . . universality" (36, quoting Levine, et al.), the authors are making a universal claim, as Dasenbrock notes. When Kuhn discusses the shifts from one paradigm to another, declaring their incommensurability, "There is . . . a dissonance between Kuhn's stated position on the status of scientific observation and his own practice as an observer of science" (39). When Fish responds to the self-refutation argument, saying that the objection "mistakes the nature of the anti-foundationalist claim" (180, quoting Fish), Fish's defense "suggests that antifoundationalist [or conventionalist] texts have a univocal meaning of a kind Fish denies" (180).

These are not logical tricks. They are genuine intellectual problems. How can Levine and his colleagues universally denounce claims of universality? If Chomsky has worked on a particular syntactic property, such as structure dependency, for years, and there is massive evidence that it is universal, why are Chomsky's claims "not to be trusted" and seen "to reflect local historical conditions" (36, quoting Levine, et al.), while the equally universal judgment of Levine, et al., is trustworthy? How can Kuhn understand many different scientific paradigms, while Einstein and other physicists cannot?

Beyond these points, I also appreciated Dasenbrock's argument in favor of intentionalist interpretation. His reasoning here is not as forceful as one might wish. However, he does a good job of showing that everyone believes in intentionalist interpretation in certain cases. For instance, Derrida manifestly advocates intentionalist interpretation when he is the author being interpreted, as Dasenbrock demonstrates.

However, I find serious problems, even at those places where I am most sympathetic with the book. Consider the treatment of analytic philosophy. First, Dasenbrock sees this as much more central to American literary theory than seems plausible. Indeed, he contends that American literary critics draw their conventionalism from pre-Putnam, pre-Davidson analytic philosophy--leading to the problem that they are therefore "over thirty years out of date" (5). But American literary theorists almost certainly draw their ideas more from Romanticism than from positivism. It is Shelley and Coleridge, influenced by German Idealism and discussing poetic imagination, that lead American critics to believe we make the world through language. It isn't Otto Neurath. Yes, American critics have been happy to pick up anyone from the "other camp" who seems to agree with the Romantic idea. Thus, they have been enthusiastic about Kuhn. But this is not because American critics were formed as analytic philosophers.

Moreover, Dasenbrock's history of analytic philosophy is itself highly misleading. He characterizes...