 Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Barbara Herrnstein Smith |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Literary criticism |
Publication date | 1988 |
| Media type | |
| ISBN | 9780674167865 |
Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory is a 1988 book by literary critic and professor Barbara Herrnstein Smith. In the book, she presents a relativistic theory of value, contending that value emerges from a dynamic process of changing and interacting variables.
Smith's view of value is radically relativistic. [1] She contends that "all value is radically contingent, being neither a fixed attribute, an inherent quality, or an objective property of things but, rather, an effect of multiple continuously changing, and continuously interacting variables." [2] She considers value to be the "product of the dynamics of a system, specifically an economic system." [2]
Contingencies of Value received generally positive views in scholarly periodicals, with some reviewers expressing misgivings about gaps and weaknesses in Smith's argument for a radically relativist theory of value.
Christopher J. Knight, writing in the Journal of Value Inquiry, summed up Smith's project in Contingencies of Value as follows: "Smith, believing that critics have wrongly framed the question of artistic value, turns away from them and toward anthropologists, critical theorists, linguists, philosophers, physicists, sociologists, etc., hoping to broaden her understanding of just what it is that determines 'aesthetic' value. For the point is, in Smith's view, that the whole question of aesthetic value—what has it, what doesn't—is decidedly problematic." [3]
William E. Cain, reviewing Contingencies of Value for Philosophy and Literature, had high praise for the book:
Barbara Herrnstein Smith's book is a powerfully argued, highly suggestive analysis of the concept of "value" in literary study and cultural commentary and critique. Smith presents a compelling case for the "radical contingency" of value and keenly describes the complex systems within which value judgments take shape, exist, and circulate. She displays a formidable command of difficult, dense philosophical issues and controversies, and her distinguished work in reviewing, elaborating upon, and re-articulating them forcefully challenges both conservative scholars who adhere to notions of "transcendent" value and radical theorists who urge that we see all value judgments as mere expressions of class, race, and gender bias. [4]
Jeffrey L. Geller reviewed the book for Philosophy & Rhetoric, and described Smith's position as placing her at the extremes of relativism: "By starting and finishing with a conception that assimilates language to action, Smith takes a place, if not a position, in the American pragmatist camp. Connor refers to Smith's exposition in Contingencies as a defense of the 'radical-pragmatist' case. Whereas Rorty is usually considered the pragmatist provocateur par excellence, we have seen that Smith consistently outflanks Rorty, earning Contingencies the distinction of being a 'more-relativist-than-Rorty' argument. [1]
Two critics, Meili Steele and Martin Mueller, criticized Smith's argument for not accounting for the source of her own vocabulary and for not acknowledging how certain value judgments would have nearly universal agreement.
Meili Steele, in Comparative Literature, wrote that "Barbara Smith's book uses a functional/systemic model drawn from sociology to examine axiological theories of the past and present. Her thesis is that 'all value is radically contingent, being neither a fixed attribute, an inherent quality, or an objective property of things but, rather, an effect of multiple continuously changing, and continuously interacting variables'—that is, value is the 'product of the dynamics of a system, specifically an economic system.'" [5]
Steele went on to zero in on this flaw in Smith's argument: "If she adopts the therapeutic goal of Wittgenstein and Rorty that seeks to rid us of obfuscatory vocabularies, she offers no justification for her vocabulary, no metatheoretical argument against competing nonfoundationalist problematics. Such a gap would not be a serious problem if the book were not so contentiously aimed at exposing others' views." [6]
Martin Mueller, reviewing the book in Salmagundi, pointed to what he found as a weakness in her account of value: "There may be practical virtue in the amiable hypocrisy of a conceptual style that never asserts the ultimate principles by which it is guided. But a theory may be at fault for claiming too little or too much, and it is clearly a weakness of Smith's account of moral life that she refuses to articulate, or even denies the existence of, rules whose violation in many cases would be noted with universal, or nearly universal, agreement." [7]
Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. There are many different forms of relativism, with a great deal of variation in scope and differing degrees of controversy among them. Moral relativism encompasses the differences in moral judgments among people and cultures. Epistemic relativism holds that there are no absolute principles regarding normative belief, justification, or rationality, and that there are only relative ones. Alethic relativism is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture. Some forms of relativism also bear a resemblance to philosophical skepticism. Descriptive relativism seeks to describe the differences among cultures and people without evaluation, while normative relativism evaluates the morality or truthfulness of views within a given framework.
Moral relativism or ethical relativism is used to describe several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different peoples and cultures. An advocate of such ideas is often referred to as a relativist for short.
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topics—such as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are all best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes.
Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and in contemporary analytic philosophy. Rorty had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative literature at Stanford University. Among his most influential books are Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989).
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Barbara Herrnstein Smith is an American literary critic and theorist, best known for her work Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. She is currently the Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory at Duke University, and also Distinguished Professor of English at Brown University.
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature is a book by Harvard University psychologist and philosopher William James. It comprises his edited Gifford Lectures on natural theology, which were delivered at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland between 1901 and 1902. The lectures concerned the psychological study of individual private religious experiences and mysticism, and used a range of examples to identify commonalities in religious experiences across traditions.
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Richard Shusterman is an American pragmatist philosopher. Known for his contributions to philosophical aesthetics and the emerging field of somaesthetics, currently he is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University.
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is a 1989 book by the American philosopher Richard Rorty, based on two sets of lectures he gave at University College, London, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. In contrast to his earlier work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty mostly abandons attempts to explain his theories in analytical terms and instead creates an alternate conceptual schema to that of the "Platonists" he rejects. In this schema "truth" is considered unintelligible and meaningless.
Ironism is a term coined by Richard Rorty, for the concept that allows rhetorical scholars to actively participate in political practices. It is described as a modernist literary intellectual's project of fashioning the best possible self through continual redescription. With this concept, Rorty argues for a contingency that rejects necessity and universality in relation to the ideas of language, self, and community.
Richard Jacob Bernstein was an American philosopher who taught for many years at Haverford College and then at The New School for Social Research, where he was Vera List Professor of Philosophy. Bernstein wrote extensively about a broad array of issues and philosophical traditions including American pragmatism, neopragmatism, critical theory, deconstruction, social philosophy, political philosophy, and hermeneutics.
Robert B. Talisse is an American philosopher and political theorist. He is currently Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is also a Professor of Political Science. Talisse is a former editor of the academic journal Public Affairs Quarterly, and a regular contributor to the blog 3 Quarks Daily, where he posts a monthly column with his frequent co-author and fellow Vanderbilt philosopher Scott Aikin. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from the City University of New York in 2001. His principal area of research is political philosophy, with an emphasis on democratic theory and liberalism.
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