Thomas Dabay compliments the balance of accessibility and rigor in Objectivity, but does not find a matching balance between its providing wide-ranging surveys on the various debates on this concept, and it’s contributing something definite to the debate. More specifically, he does not find that I develop my pragmatic pluralist reconstruction of objectivity with enough clarity and depth. The challenge Dabay thus puts to me is a quite reasonable one: To either clarify how a unique, pragmatic pluralist account of objectivity is developed in the book, or to use the opportunity of this exchange to expand on this further. I am glad for the opportunity, and though space is short, shall try to do a little of each.

To first situate my reply, I do not believe myself guilty of equivocating between use and mention—between the task of developing a pluralist account of objectivity and just referring to or counting up the plural ways that others have treated the term. As one task of volumes in the Key Concepts in Philosophy series is to provide a useful overview of debates on one’s topic, there were numerous aspects of the debate where I found it useful to stay neutral, and of course others where I needed to take a stand in order to situate and develop my own account. Certainly I thought of pragmatic pluralism as genuinely an account of objectivity, one meeting the “dual demand” described in Scott Aikin’s introduction to this exchange, and not merely a survey of the plural different ways that the term “objectivity” is used in the literature. Dabay is surely right that cataloguing what people “have to say” about objectivity is not to provide an account of one’s own. But I perceive Dabay to be dichotomizing between use and mention—between what theorists think of write about a concept, and the “what it is” question. Certainly dichotomizing in this way does not fit well with the “practice” orientation of pragmatism and social epistemology. Relatedly, it strikes me that a good deal of difference between us may be a matter of the philosophical style to which we each adhere, and with this, what exactly we expect that a philosophical theory should do. I am a historically inclined writer who finds history and practice to be quite relevant to theory; very early in the book I said that my approach would have aspects of genealogy, rather than attempting to analyze the concept of objectivity into a set of necessary and sufficient conditions (8). I consider myself a moderate historicist about norms of objectivity.1 So it was fitting for me to develop my views through and in relation to the exiting debates and debaters on my topic, and it doesn’t bother me that I “spend most of my time” discussing those on whose shoulders I stand. But of course it certainly should disturb me if readers find that this gets in the way of my making my own argument clear, or that an original contribution to the debate is lacking. I do wish in hindsight that I had provided chapter summaries and an overall book conclusion to better outline the positive argument of the book, and to draw it all together better.

Analytic definitions are best for concepts that are univocal in meaning, but my view of the concept of objectivity is that it is not. Indeed, the close connections between a pragmatic pluralist account for which I took Richard Bernstein’s work as an initial model, and Heather Douglas’ “irreducible complexity of objectivity” thesis, were asserted very early in the text (15), and, I thought, developed at multiple points along the way. From the start the irreducibility thesis was contrasted with examples of people who assert that objectivity has univocal meaning, or a single “core” meaning that its various uses can be systematically reduced to (most notably Robert Nozick’s “invariability under transformations” account) (7). Although I was not interested in formal definition, I was very interested in the adequacy of the many proposed taxonomies of senses and kinds of objectivity. For the sake developing a pluralist account tied closely to the argument for irreducibility, I took on board Heather Douglas’s taxonomy of eight modes in three kinds (machine-aided, individual, and group, or Objectivity₁, Objectivity₂, and Objectivity₃, respectively), and referred back to this plural taxonomy when discussing various scientific and non-scientific fields. These later instantiations of the adopted taxonomy of the modes and markers of objectivity were meant to underline for readers that while the recognized kinds of cognitive objectivity all reflect norms of impartial reasoning, these machine-aided, individual, and communal kinds of objectivity are non-reducible one to another.

The book is concerned primarily with pluralism in the context both of dialectical objectivity and of disciplinary objectivity.2 Although a good deal of my pluralism is developed in the context of the objects, aims, and methods in the sciences (part 2), pragmatic pluralism is also connected with dialectical objectivity as a concern with broader oppositions like those between realism and non-realism, or between philosophy and skepticism (part 1 & 3; see my reply to Levine). I found Richard Bernstein’s pragmatic pluralism in Beyond Relativism and Objectivism and The Pragmatic Turn useful to my concerns with dialectical objectivity. Radical axiology, which re-describes the core claims of metaphysical systems as normative claims about the conditions for the intelligibility of all knowledge, I tried to show, provides resources to pursue the concerns of dialectical objectivity (40–44). The shared task of identifying core axiological posits of contending theories and assessing them for logical compatibility is what I elsewhere term the dialectics of objectivity (2012; 2015). It involves trying to understand the philosophical motivations and dialectical give-and-take of thinkers involved in these debates. Although I discussed many non-scientific contexts where norms of objectivity are still rightly valued and maintained, it is natural that more of the discussion focused on the sciences, and in particular on the similarities and differences between the natural and the human sciences. Dabay’s concerns are primarily with part 2 and the sciences, so I will largely restrict myself to pluralism about disciplinary objectivity in the remainder of this reply.

One way that I developed my own form of pluralism distinct from Douglas’s was in the treatment of objectivity in the natural and human sciences. Dabay mentions the extended discussion of the positivists and of Carl Hempel as a prime example of my talking mainly just about how other philosophers understood the concept of objectivity. What I thought of myself as doing was quite different. Chapter 3 directly exposed the flaws of the positivists’ “unity of the sciences” thesis, and the associated “logicist” conceptions of theory-choice, whether verificationist or falsificationist. Chapter 4 carried this challenge to the unity of the sciences further by critically examining and rejecting what I termed Hempel’s Demand, the demand that to be considered scientific, the human or social sciences need to operate within the “covering law” model of explanation that he and other logical empiricists considered the epitome of scientific methodology. Thus, there is a sustained critical attack running through and connecting the chapters on method in the natural and human sciences, an attack explicitly targeting the methodological unity of the sciences that logical positivism endorsed. I firstly employ Wesley Salmon’s argument (1989) that the covering law model is both too weak and too strong to characterize the goals and methods even of the physical sciences. My discussion of verstehen and of the classical divisions between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften had to cover a lot of thinkers quickly, but was not neutral. Here too I was working to ferret through different conceptions and rationales for such divisions, in order to assess which were the weaker and stronger naturalistic grounds for rejecting Hempel’s Demand.

Now all of this may seem to be negative argument; while to a substantial degree a “pluralism” may be established by refuting the argument for monism, this would be only a thin rationale, and one that I would not have been satisfied with. So I also tried to provide more positive support for, and characterization of, pluralism about disciplinary objectivity. This account was buttressed by examples of the different kinds of objects that are the focus of study in the human as compared with the natural sciences. It examines for example how the objects of study in the human sciences tend to be value laded (“poverty,” for example), in ways that the objects of the physical sciences are not. So choice of methods is very often a function of features specific to the problem and of the particular aims of the research. I am sure that I did not do enough to harness extant arguments that support scientific pluralism to the service of pluralism about objectivity (114). Scientific Pluralism holds that multiple scientific theories can offer valid accounts of known phenomena, their validity or correctness being judged in light of different background assumptions and cognitive goals. These two forms of pluralism are overlapping and I think mutually supportive; their connections are another way to explicate the view that method, rather than unitary.

The pluralist account I develop is closely connected with the issue of the chronic or temporary nature of the underdetermination problem in various fields of study, and this may be the most original aspect of the book’s argument. Verificationism and falsifications both, though for somewhat different reasons, fail to take proper account of the problem of the underdetermination of theory by data. I reject radical meaning holism, but argue that a moderate confirmation holism drives us to recognize both synchronic and diachronic epistemic values as needed to address local (or discipline-specific) underdetermination problems.

These problems are closely connected to theory-choice, and so in turn raise the thorny problem of the relationship between cognitive and social values. In the debate over science and values that ensued in the post-positivist era, what I argued was a very unsound way of treating underdetermination problems was to insist that one or the other, cognitive value or social values, must be what resolves the problem when one moves from dissensus to a new consensus in the field. That grand either/or that was at the heart of the “Tie-Breaker Model,” I argued, was a faulty shared assumption of the positivists and those early, radical post-positivist accounts that tended to devalue the concept of objectivity altogether. While I think we have largely ridded ourselves of it, in chapter 5 I distinguish two main contemporary camps on the relationship between cognitive and social values as “entanglers” and “disentanglers,” and I take a tentative stance in favor of the latter. Earlier, the field of historiography had come in for extended discussion in elaborating the underdetermination problem and its relevance to debates about objectivity. Debate over methods and over the value of the objectivity ideal for history writers was chosen in order to best illustrate the difference between fields of study where theory virtues are generally sufficient to overcome local underdetermination problems (typically leading to a new consensus after a brief period of competing theories), and fields such as history where underdetermination worries are chronic, or ever-present. The very different aims that history writers can adopt, the diversity of methods that serve those aims, and the lack of a shared list of theory virtues, are all the result and reaction to the chronic condition of historical facts underdetermining theories in this field. But I also suggested that the identification of fields where underdetermination problems are chronic as opposed to just temporary does not match the traditional distinctions between either “natural” and “social” sciences, nor again between “hard” and “soft” sciences. So a major conclusion of these chapters focusing on norms of objectivity in the sciences was that in order to account for these differences, we need a more varied —a more “mottled”—conception of the relationship between the sciences.

Works Cited

Axtell, G. (2012). “The Dialectics of Objectivity.” Journal of the Philosophy of History 6 (3): 339–68.

———. (2015). “Navigating the Dialectics of Objectivity.” In The Future of Social Epistemology: A Collective Vision, edited by James Collier, 97–106. Rowman & Littlefield.

Bernstein, R. (1983). Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

———. (2010). The Pragmatic Turn. Cambridge: Polity.

Daston, L., and P. Galison. (2007). Objectivity. New York: Zone Books.

Eldridge, M. (2007). “In Defense of Pragmatic Pluralism.” Draft paper at http://home/163979.cloudwaysapps.com/esbfrbwtsm/public_html.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/SAAP/TAMU/P43G.htm.

Rosenthal, S. (1994). Charles Peirce’s Pragmatic Pluralism. New York: SUNY Press.

Salmon, W. (1989). Four Decades of Scientific Explanation. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.

Talisse, R., and S. Aikin. (2005). “Why Pragmatists Cannot Be Pluralists.” Transactions of the Charles Sanders Pierce Society 41 (1): 101–18.

Shannon Dea is concerned with the treatment of standpoint epistemology in my book. That treatment comes in Chapter 5, “Objectivity Rehabilitated,” where my reconstruction tries to take on board many of the insights of social and feminist epistemologies, but also distances itself from certain doubtful claims made by standpoint theorists. Dea holds that by focusing more on Julie Nelson’s than on Sandra Harding’s account of what feminist standpoint theorists term “strong objectivity,” I made its accommodation too easy on myself, through characterizing strong objectivity as a less challenging thesis than it is.  According to Dea I also missed seeing the advantages for modern liberals in the age of Trump, of a “more subversive, more overtly political” version of standpoint theory.

Perhaps I could have done more to distinguish between different versions of standpoint theory. But in response to the first point, although it is correct that I favored Nelson’s work, I did also discuss Harding directly in the book. Indeed, passages that were discussed from Nelson’s book Feminism, Objectivity, and Economics included the same example of bias in economics that Dea described as unique to Harding’s ‘strong’ version: that labor statistics leave out unpaid domestic labor, tending thereby to render it invisible (152). But in the bigger picture, it is undoubtedly true that I find it easier to take on board insights from what Dea calls “a weaker, less political version of Strong Objectivity.” What the book does in this regard is to describe what I take to have been an important ‘turn’ within feminism itself, from being pretty dismissive of the concept of objectivity in the 1970’s and 80’s, to instead, post-1990, offering positive, reconstructive accounts of it. The book’s Introduction and Chapter 5 both point out how this shift is well-documented within feminist circles, and how it was mirrored to an extent in a serious rethinking within standpoint epistemology as first formulated.1

These moderated approaches are those that I could most easily be taken on board; by contrast, approaches characterized by the notions that inquiry is inevitably political, that dominant ideas are always a function of the interests of a ruling class, or that that knowledge and truth are community-bound, are ones that miss taking this positive, reconstructive turn. Another way to put this is that these more radical standpoint epistemologies are those that seem most subject to Susan Haack-style charges of ‘cynicism.’ Interestingly, Dea suggests that her overtly political version of standpoint theory makes for a better response to Haack’s criticisms, but she doesn’t explain why she thinks this. There is not a lot of detail on what a “political” version is in her short paper, but one would think that the more overtly political or partisan an author’s standpoint is, the less resources they have —not the more— for answering to such worries. An especial concern I have with the standpoint theorists’ dependence on a rhetoric of circumstantial ad hominem. It is “good standpoint theorist fashion” she concedes, to dismiss others on the grounds that “Those are exactly the kinds of things we’d expect…” from people of a certain pre-categorized class, race, sex, etc. to say. This indeed strikes me as a cynicism about motives, and a fallacious ‘fashion’ to the extent that it leads us to look at the persons making an argument, rather than at the argument they make. Such an approach cannot help us to distinguish between more and less biased views, which feminists and critical race theorists should want to do.

Thus far I have responded only to general worries about Dea’s ‘strong’ qua ‘overtly political’ version of standpoint theory. To summarize, let us note that when she describes less overtly political versions as “weaker” and more overtly political versions as “stronger,” this is merely formal: It describes how challenging or in her own words, “subversive” the view is, relative to others. More moderate or circumspect views will always be ‘weaker’ on this scale. What we need, however, are reasons to think that the version she prefers is stronger in a philosophical sense i.e., better supported or more plausible. This I do not think she has done, but we have yet to look at her actual test case: liberal politics in the ‘age of Trump.’ So let us consider this now, as it perhaps makes for a good way to update and extend this debate over different versions of standpoint theory.

In describing Donald Trump’s rise to the Presidency, Dea very nicely points out the irony that the middle-class whites who drove him to office were essentially borrowing a page from the politics of standpoint theorists. They used a formally similar rhetoric, she allows, while persuasively reversing the prevailing narrative by describing themselves as a class forgotten or marginalized. Both groups could use standpoint tactics and argue that power differentials skew inquiry in favor of dominant approaches. Barack Obama’s liberal supporters, and Washington insiders more generally, were effectively branded as the ‘elite’ doing the marginalizing and disempowering. The standpoint theorist’s recommendation to accord more weight to marginalized voices requires an antecedent conception of which standpoints are amplified and which are muffled under the current system of power. It is precisely this narrative that this has been successfully challenged by Trump’s supporters, by ignoring the plight of historically marginalized groups such as women and minorities, in favor of the ‘muffling’ of the working white middle class in recent administrations.

 Dea seems well-aware that it is a problem for standpoint theorists that their tactics could be appropriated and re-directed by their right-wing political opponents. “Recalibration” is a basic notion for how to amend bias, according to feminist standpoint and critical race theory. So to follow the parallel with standpoint theory further, they might well hold that we should now recalibrate for this by making the perspective of this marginalized group the primary one, or the “starting point for inquiry” going forward. Some of these cries about who constitutes the elite do seem to be “purely polemical,” as she notes. So Dea has supplied an interesting analysis of the situation, to be sure. But what lessons should we draw from it? The lesson she wants liberals to draw is a need to adopt a still more “subversive,” and overtly political stance. But again, I wish she had explained why. I do not see compelling reason to think that this as the right lesson to draw; nor do I think Dea’s suggestion is politically advantageous if we want more political dialogue and less polemics, more cooperation and less partisanship, in American politics. Once we get past the confusion between becoming more activist, as many liberals are today, and accepting the correctness of an overtly political account of inquiry, I would argue that the latter is less rather than more helpful to the liberal cause than the moderate versions of standpoint theory. We must be careful about any discourse which rubs shoulders with the circumstantial ad hominem, or which relies on the over-generalized prescription that the previously marginalized should become “the starting point” for inquiry. For this is also what those people across the aisle are able to mirror, if perversely, in their own demands.

One alternative to all this polemical discourse, I would like to suggest, is a new and more functional means of diversity inclusion, one that promotes more bipartisanship and value pluralism. I think of this alternative as supported by Jonathan Haidt’s social constructionist view in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012), an approach which not-incidentally would have allowed liberals to better anticipate how the messages of the Trump campaign might find the strong support that they did, in what had seemed to most a deeply-divided political right. Haidt is able to explain the rift between right and left in a way that lends itself to recognizing that there are good moral and political motives on both sides of the isle, but also to awareness of the different core values and symbols that each tend to find appealing. Prescriptively, Haidt points to the need for more awareness by all citizens of the moral intuitions of people on the other side of the political aisle. Thus, his is an empirically-informed, descriptive value pluralism. If many liberals cannot understand conservative values and their multiple “triggers,” and instead simply take conservatives as narrow-minded, as duped, or as people of bad moral motivation, then arguably they fail to be open-minded enough themselves. A quote I used in Chapter 6 still seems to me to make the crucial point quite well:

If value pluralism is in fact at the heart of political disagreement  . . .  then the virtues of reflexivity, reciprocity, and “distanciation” with respect to one’s own values really are required. But these virtues may be less essential when conflict is viewed as a clash of political interests… indeed, where disputes are grounded in political conflict rather than value pluralism, the call to abstract from one’s conception of the good, or from individual and com-munity interests, can seem like a pernicious move in a political game. . . .2

To conclude, the ‘age of Trump’ may well be an age of greatly-increased activism for progressives. But I think it marks a confusion in thought analogous to the one discussed in this quote, to identify that activism with Dea’s ‘overtly political’ version of what standpoint theorists refer to as strong objectivity. Dea’s suggestion does not seem not to push us to be more objective by freeing ourselves from one-sided perspectives. Again I need details of just what the political version of standpoint theory comes to, but what I worry may not be found in it that I think is better-maintained in its moderate forms is explicit support of scientific integrity, and a fact-based approach to public policy. For a problem in holding that scientific knowledge is uniformly politicized is that we can no longer set conditions for violation of scientific integrity, or detect special cases of the politicization of science. So which version of standpoint theory, I want to ask, best supports citizens standing up for long-term thinking about the environment; for the independence of scientific facts about global warming; for the need for rigorous and independent journalism; and for the need for checks and balances, and fiduciary obligations that are so easily made lax by corporate self-regulation? The cynicism about science we have seen expressed in President Trump’s campaign and early months in office has led the age of Trump to have been recently dubbed a ‘post-truth’ age in several editorials. Until alleviated, my worry with Dea’s proposal is remains that the irony she well-articulates in the ‘mirroring’ of standpoint theory by the President’s supporters may actually be substantially greater than she thinks. For this irony is surely enlarged if it turns out that the far right she opposes and the left-liberal response she recommends, share a cynicism about norms of impartial reasoning, and about deliberative virtues of distanciation with respect to one’s own values.

Works Cited

Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books.

Intemann, K. (2010). “25 Years of Feminist Empiricism and Standpoint Theory: Where Are We Now?” Hypatia 25 (4): 778–796.

Kahane, D., D. Weinstock, D. Leydet, and M. Williams (eds.). (2010). Deliberative Democracy in Practice. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press.

Longino, H. (1990). Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry.  Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press.

Nelson, J. (1996). Feminism, Objectivity, and Economics. London: Routledge.

Steven Levine challenges the sufficiency of the role that I give to “ontological objectivity” in my account. He argues that even thinkers of pragmatist orientation—an orientation we share—should acknowledge a “notion” of ontological objectivity, where he then associates this notion with a “level” or “kind” of objectivity. “The question I want to ask is this: can one, on pragmatic grounds, argue that there is an intelligible notion of ontological objectivity distinct from the epistemic sense of objectivity, which does not depend on metaphysical realism?” Answering his focal question affirmatively, he concludes that “Axtell is right that there is no ontological account of objectivity that concerns what is ‘there anyway’ in complete independence of our take on things. But he is wrong, at least by my lights, in thinking that this leaves us with no intelligible account of ontological objectivity.”

Levine’s comments make me aware of an apparent tension between what I say about epistemic and ontological senses of objectivity in my introduction, and my subsequent attempt in part 1 to dialectically reconcile the core axiological posits of realism, constructivism, and idealism. So let me first address a point I would concede to Levine, and then I will defend a key distinction, which was perhaps not clear enough in the book, between “senses” and “kinds” of objectivity. Thereafter we can address more directly what I take to be a misinterpretation of the book: that it doesn’t aspire to provide an intelligible account of ontological objectivity.

What I would concede to my critic is my mistake in claiming in the introduction that the notion of ontological objectivity presupposes a suspect metaphysical realism. Some objective world talk clearly does; but my subsequent rejection of Nagel’s metaphysical realist account of ontological objectivity may give the impression that the whole notion of ontological objectivity loses its validity and value in the account. This would be inconsistent with the work of part 1, which tries to treat a dual demand by reconciling the axiological posits of realism and anti-realism (idealism and constructionism). On the whole it would have been more self-consistent for me to have reversed my claim, and said that metaphysical realism is suspect for the specific account of ontological objectivity it presupposes.

I made two further claims in the introduction that without adequate clarification might appear at odds with each other, and as further suggesting a simple dismissal of ontological objectivity: the first, that the “primary sense” of objectivity is its cognitive or epistemological sense, and the second, that metaphysical or ontological “objective world—talk really isn’t a kind of objectivity” (2). Levine especially wants to challenge the second claim. That is fine, and below I defend my claim. But let us start by pointing out that the claim that ontological objectivity is not a kind of objectivity need not be equated with any claim that there is “no intelligible account” of it. The “kinds” as I have said are all of them epistemic, but the “senses” of the term are not. Ascribing to it a “secondary sense” would presuppose rather than negate its having a role to play in the dialectics of objectivity. But in retrospect I could have made much clearer this distinction between senses and kinds of objectivity. It is only by assimilating these that we can get from my claim that objective-world talk is a “secondary sense” to Levine’s interpretation: that my account leaves us with “no intelligible account” of ontological objectivity.

There are legitimate epistemological and ontological senses of the term “objective,” but the kinds of objectivity are all of them epistemic because the kinds are constitutive of activities: processes of inquiry and assessments of the products of inquiry. So to say that objective world-talk really isn’t a kind of objectivity is not to make the far stronger claim Levine associates with it. Levine’s Hegelian answer to his question distinguishes three “levels,” the epistemic, the level of content, and the ontological level. The taxonomy I employed does not distinguish levels like this, but it does distinguish and allow legitimate epistemic and ontological senses. In discussion of kinds, I largely defer to Heather Douglas’s taxonomy with eight modes within three kinds. The modes invoke specific agreed “markers” of objectivity, and the kinds refer to different sorts of processes of inquiry, divided by direct or machinery-extended interface with the natural world, the reasoning of an individual, and the reasoning of a group (objectivity₁, objectivity₂, and objectivity₃, respectively). We could talk about comparative advantages of our Hegelian (Levine) or pragmatic pluralist taxonomies, but both approaches clearly aim to understand and account for dual demands of realists and their critics, and to that extent both aspire to provide an intelligible role for the ontological sense of “objective.”1

Let us look closer at the account I do provide, in order to show more fully that my account treats the dual demands of epistemology and ontology, rather than being unduly one-sided. I distanced my account from metaphysical realism, especially as Thomas Nagle develops it as inviting skepticism. An initial chasm between the subjective and objective worlds in this approach leads to a kind of futile “bridge-building” that can never put perception (appearance) and reality back in touch adequately again. But Levine, too, distances himself from metaphysical realism, and wants to meet the dual demand with something short of it, so that is not the issue between us. For both Levine and myself I take it want to rehabilitate ontological objectivity apart from the strong thesis of metaphysical realism understood as the “block universe” (James) or the “view from nowhere” (Nagel), etc. I appreciate in Levine’s account that like myself he wants to avoid the Cartesian Anxiety and the oscillation between objectivism and relativism that it motivates. The main argument Levine uses to establish a sense of ontological objectivity distinct from epistemic or cognitive objectivity is that inquiry into the order of knowing (his two levels), “presupposes that this order depends on a prior order—the order of being.” But he seems to miss that I also drew upon the useful distinction between the order of being and the order of knowing. I wrote that a realist demand “seems reasonable if maintained as a point about the order of being.” But to qualify this I continue, “It is quite different to claim that (1) what exists in the natural order exists independently of our epistemic standards (the ‘presupposition in ontological objectivity’ claim), and that (2) we have independent access to the true or real in a way that allows it to be a direct arbiter of conflicting theories or beliefs.” (Objectivity, 37; see also 31)

I agree with Levine, then, that making ontological objectivity “a presupposition rather than a substantive position” is the way to understand this sense of objectivity apart from metaphysical realism. What really divides Levine and myself, I think, is mainly the nature or status of this “presupposition.”2 I would want to insist that this “notion” is of a status that—in order to make good that mentioned distinction from the epistemic—is neither a “kind” nor a “level” of objectivity. Arguably, these latter sorts of status are what threaten to make of the ontological sense a “substantive position.” Instead of philosophy, the independence of the order of being is a value-charged presupposition of inquiry: an axiological posit.3 So I would propose we eschew Levine’s language of levels along with the language of primary and secondary, which in retrospect is not helpful either.4

The dialectics of objectivity means to me an account uncommitted to over-strong metaphysical conceptions of realism and idealism, while affirming that the more moderate claims might be understood as legitimate expressions of conditions of the intelligibility of all knowledge. The reconciliation which the dialectic of realism, constructivism, and idealism seeks to show forth is the explication of the axiological sources of their conflict, and thus holds the potential to find them, thus re-construed, logically compatible. They are still more than compatible, but complementary, if the intelligibility of knowledge requires a mutually-implicating “minimum” of each.5 An account of objectivity must meet an at least “double” demand, and disputes over primacy are attempts to deny this by ignoring that the initial premise of each side is a logically-underivable evaluative claim. Some such claims are more legitimate than others, but the realist minimum as I affirm it in the book is a principle of intelligibility such that the enterprises of knowledge, truth, and meaning could not take flight except at least implicit acknowledgment of it. Both Levine’s account and my own seem optimistic. Of course none of us can claim to have a magic bullet to kill off such long-standing theoretical oppositions as we are here concerned with. The prescription for a dialectics of objectivity—for an account of realist, idealist, and constructivist “minimums” that would be logically consistent—has a long way to go.