Richard Bernstein, in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, also advocates for a practice-guided hermeneutic awareness of epistemological claims. Bernstein is a relativist as far as truth-claims are concerned because he agrees with Rorty that there is no grand narrative or overarching framework that can mediate between alternative foundationalist arguments:
there is no substantive overarching framework in which radically different and alternative schemes are commensurable—no universal standards that somehow stand outside of and above these competing alternatives.87
85 Jonathan Dancy, Ethics Without Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 5.
86 Dancy, Ethics Without Principles, 133-134.
87 Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 11-12.
Bernstein agrees with Rorty that the Modern attempt to replace the contingency of social practices with a more solid and substantial epistemological objectivism has failed.88 He argues that in spite of several decades of debate over concepts like rationality, truth, and knowledge, contemporary discussion still takes an either/or approach to what he calls traditional extremes. Bernstein‘s either/or approach to epistemological arguments closely resembles that same comparison referred to earlier by Williams. Bernstein argues that a Cartesian either/or anxiety exists because moral agents are informed that they either adopt forms of ―objectivism, foundationalism, ultimate grounding of knowledge, science, philosophy, and language‖ or society collapses into ―relativism, skepticism, historicism and nihilism.‖89
Bernstein also argues that Descartes‘ search for certainty produced an overriding
―intellectual confidence‖ that the ―secure path for philosophy‖ had been discovered, a ―right method‖ that would yield ―genuine intellectual progress‖
because it turned philosophy into a discipline that yields knowledge (epistēmē) rather than a discipline based on the ―endless battleground for competing and shifting opinions (doxai).‖90 The belief in a ―permanent, ahistorical matrix or framework to which we can ultimately appeal in determining the nature of rationality, knowledge, truth, reality, goodness, or rightness‖91 was driven by what Bernstein refers to as a ―Cartesian anxiety.‖92
88 Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 197.
89 Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 2-3.
90 Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 3.
91 Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 8.
92 Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 16-20.
Either there is some support for our being, a fixed foundation for our knowledge, or we cannot escape the forces of darkness that envelop us with madness, with intellectual and moral chaos.93
Bernstein claims that the reason why the battle against relativism has been so pervasive is because there may be nothing, ―not God, Philosophy, Science, or Poetry—that satisfies our longing for foundations, for a fixed Archimedean point upon which we can secure our thought and action.‖94 In the historical setting of distrust toward traditional repositories of truth (church, state, culture, etc.), anxiety might seem reasonable and perhaps even pragmatically necessary during the early stages of the Enlightenment. Bernstein‘s suggestion is that we should now reject the anxiety of both unsatisfied objectivism and pessimistic relativism. Like others mentioned previously, he advocates a return to practice-guided decision making contingent upon history and precedent. Bernstein cites MacIntyre‘s argument that objectivity comes from knowing ―how and when to put rules and principles to work and when not to‖ in disciplines like law, medicine, and science because there are no set rules ―specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for large areas of such practices‖ and because skills associated with practical rationality are communicated ―partly by precepts‖ but much more by ―case-histories and precedents.‖95
Bernstein says the twentieth century hermeneutic shift in philosophy began as a Continental movement with the publication of Heidegger‘s Being and Time and
93 Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 18.
94 Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 230.
95 Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 57.
Gadamer‘s Truth and Method.96 He follows Gadamer in claiming that rather than attempting to escape relativism by continuing the fruitless search for theory-centred objectivism, that pursuit should be discontinued and replaced by a practice-guided form of objectivity, following Aristotle.97 Gadamer and Bernstein claim that philosophical hermeneutics is heir to the type of practical philosophy that Aristotle advocates.
According to Bernstein, this old/new understanding of practical rationality is
―dialogical‖ because it places stress on the ―practical communal character‖ of rationality.98 He acknowledges that this approach is pluralistic, but not in a flabby or defensive sense of pluralism.99 Some moral claims are better than others in the same way that some scientific claims are better than others, primarily because they seem to work. Defensive or fortress-like pluralism occurs when disparate groups work out their own isolated frameworks for ethics without communicating with others.100 Bernstein rejects this approach as well and advocates a type of
―engaged pluralism‖ whereby multiple parties acknowledge their own fallibilities and attempt to be responsive to each other. He argues for ―engaged fallibilistic pluralism‖ because it represents what is best in the pragmatic tradition. It involves vigilance against the dual temptations of ―simply dismissing what others are
96 Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 34-36.
97 Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 39-40.
98 Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, 172.
99 Richard J. Bernstein, ―Metaphysics, Critique, and Utopia,‖ Review of Metaphysics 42 (December 1988): 255-273.
100 Bernstein, ―Metaphysics, Critique, and Utopia,‖ 255-273.
saying‖ and also of ―thinking we can always easily translate what is alien into our own entrenched vocabularies.‖101