Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary

by Catherine Z. Elgin

In Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary, Catherine Z. Elgin maps a constructivist alternative to the standard Anglo-American conception of philosophy's problematic. Under the standard conception, unless answers to philosophical questions are absolute, they are arbitrary. Unless a philosophy is grounded in determinate, agent-neutral facts, it is right only relative to a perspective that cannot in the end be justified. Elgin charts a course between the two poles, showing how fact and value intertwine, where art and science intersect.
Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary cuts a path through philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and philosophy of art, disclosing common problems, resources, and solutions. Elgin highlights the ineliminability of values from the realm of facts, the dependence of facts on category schemes, and the ways human interests, practices, and goals affect the categories we contrive.

Genres: Philosophy

224 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1997

About the author

Catherine Z. Elgin is Professor of the Philosophy of Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the author of Considered Judgment, Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary, With Reference to Reference, and (with Nelson Goodman) Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences.

Reviews

[Alex Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

While clearly written, this book is also frustrating. What's frustrating about it, is also what I liked about it. Elgin attempts to calibrate between the absolute and the arbitrary. The way she does so is through this series of essays in which she emphasizes a constructivist approach to language, meaning, belief, identity and other kinds of objectivities. Unfortunately she is unable to find a stable point to align to. While she takes an analytic philosophy basis between these differences she ultimately judges these attempts on the basis of agency. She seems unable to realize that her pragmatic function relies heavily on the applicability of any knowledge as a philosophic credit, all the while she talks about this as if it's in plain sight. In a way her addressing past philosophers with their previous inquiries, which is a credit to her book, act as a barrier for her to really establish her own platform of assessing and generating philosophical knowledge.

I think in a greater sense, absolute positions are also arbitrary, even if they are absolute immanently. The main cut that creates this inflection point in establishing such a difference is that of the transcendental. While Elgin realizes there are different domains of knowledge, she does not seem to able to account for how these domains are different or how they interact or do not comprehend one another. In this sense, while I admire her book, her book is an incomplete gesture at attaining a fundamentally consistent application as to what is absolute and what is arbitrary. The accepted synopsis given by the publisher demonstrate this distinction quite clearly in that absolute is relied on in a traditional sense of being a true basis where as arbitrary is understood as being what is contingent. Nowhere in this book does she have a discussion about these categories even if she titles her book after them. In this sense, her reliance on the "absoluteness" of her definitions betray a blind spot in how she judges the validity/applicability of any concept. I think a discussion involving domain parameters (transcendentals, if you will) will be a good place to begin to frame how this distinction is itself arbitrary, although of course, such a discussion should not remain locked in terms of transcendentals at all.