Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).
Consequences of Pragmatism (1982).
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989).
Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers I (1991).
Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II (1991). Limited Inc (1990).
Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought In Twentieth Century America (1998).
Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III (1998).
Philosophy and Social Hope (2000).
The Future of Religion (with Gianni Vattimo) (2005).
Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers IV (2007).
Change in style > from the analytical article to
the philosophical essay, i.e. a switch from a more argumentative to a more
evocative style.
Provocative
one-liners or titles.
Examples:
‘Solidarity or Objectivity?’ and ‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’.
Open
encounter with different vocabularies.
Destruction and Construction
·
An
open encounter with different vocabularies implies an uplifting critique.
·
Critique
> destruction of epistemology (i.e. mentalism, philosophy of consciousness).
·
Uplifting
> construction of new vocabularies that are free from the flaws of
epistemology.
·
It
is this kind of uplifting critique that makes out of Rorty a (neo)pragmatist
philosopher.
·
One
of Rorty’s heroes is the pragmatist John Dewey.
1. BEYOND EPISTEMOLOGY
In articulating what James and Dewey said about these topics, Rorty distinguishes three different “sloganistic characterizations of” pragmatism:
1. “anti-essentialism applied to notions like ‘truth,’ ‘knowledge’
‘language,’ ‘morality,’ and similar objects of philosophical theorizing.”
2. “there is no epistemological difference between truth about what
ought to be and truth about what is”.
3. “there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones” .
To understand the view that Rorty calls “anti-essentialism,” we first need to consider a traditional philosophical distinction: that between essence and accident, a.k.a. the distinction between essential properties and accidental properties…
Essential properties: the properties belonging to a thing and without which that thing would not be the thing that it is (sine qua non)
if a thing x has a property F, and F is an essential property of x, then, if x were to cease to have F, x would cease to exist. For example…
An essential property of Socrates is that he is human (rational animal). if he ceases to be human, he will cease to be altogether and is replaced with a new substance.
Descartes held that minds are essentially things that think, i.e., that a mind that loses the property of thinking is no longer a mind at all.
Accidental properties: these are a thing’s inessential properties, (i.e., the traits that the thing could lose and still be the thing that it is.)
If a thing x has a property F, and F is an accidental property of x, then if x were to cease to have F, x would not necessarily cease to exist.
For example, were I to lose weight, I would still be me. My weight is an accidental feature of me, not an essential feature, my repeated attempts to lose weight notwithstanding.
The doctrine that there are essences is:
Essentialism: for at least some class of things, there is a property or set of properties that all and only members of the set share, by virtue of which they are members of that set. And this is a mind independent fact. (Is so, whether anyone recognizes it or not.)
Within the tradition of Western philosophy, the task of philosophy has sometimes been conceived as the discovery of the essence of such things as truth, knowledge, goodness, reality, justice, etc. ... to say what it is for a claim to be true, for a belief to count as knowledge, for an action to be good, for something to be real, etc.
Rorty denies that there are any such things as the essence of truth, of knowledge, of goodness, of reality, etc. for philosophers to discover.
Truth and
Correspondence
James on Truth: Against Correspondence.
Rorty’s position on truth is an example of his anti-essentialism. Citing James’s, Rorty claims that truth is “what is good in the way of belief.” Rorty is referring to this passage from James’s “What Pragmatism Means”:
The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons. [1]...
‘What would be better for us to believe’! This sounds very like a definition of truth. It comes very near to saying ‘what we ought to believe’: and in that definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought we ever not to believe what it is better for us to believe? And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart?[2]
“Pragmatism says no, and I fully agree with her.”
Rorty seems to be less impressed by James’s positive statements about truth than by the fact that these statements are all James says about what truth is:
“[James’s description of truth] has struck his critics as not to the point, as unphilosophical, as like the suggestion that the essence of aspirin is that it is good for headaches. James’s point, however, was that there is nothing deeper to be said: truth is not the sort of thing which has an essence.[3]
Rorty takes James to be implying, not simply that truth does not have an essence, but, more specifically, that the correspondence theory of truth is of “no use,” that it is not “enlightening.”
Rorty emphasizes the fact that James rejected the correspondence theory of truth.
[James’s] point was that it is no use being told that truth is “correspondence to reality.”
“Given a language and a view of what the world is like, one can, to be sure, pair off bits of the language with bits of what one takes the world to be in such a way that the sentences one believes true have internal structures isomorphic to relations between things in the world. When we rap out routine undeliberated reports like “This is water,” “That’s red,” “That’s ugly,” “That’s immoral,” our short categorical sentences can easily be thought of as pictures, or as symbols which fit together to make a map. Such reports do indeed pair little bits of language with little bits of the world. Once one gets to negative universal hypotheticals*, and the like, such pairing will become messy and ad hoc, but perhaps it can be done. James’s point was that carrying out this exercise will not enlighten us about why truths are good to believe, or offer any clues as to why or whether our present view of the world is, roughly, the one we should hold. ”[4]
The
correspondence theory if truth is more plausible for sentences at this end.
|
This
is red.
|
|
|
Jupiter
has moons.
|
|
|
The
Earth goes around the sun.
|
|
|
There
is no such thing as natural motion.
|
|
|
The
universe it infinite.
|
|
|
Love
is the only law.
|
…but
not at all plausible for sentences at this end.
|
History
is the story of class struggle.
|
· truth is “what you can defend against all comers” [i.e., against all opponents] (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979, p.308)
· to call a sentence true is merely to give it “a rhetorical [i.e., verbal] pat on the back”.(Consequences of Pragmatism, 1982, pp. xiii).
· there is no such thing as “the way things really are” (“Truth Without Correspondence to Reality,” in Philosophy and Social Hope p.27).
Not surprisingly, this has led critics to accuse Rorty of accepting a sort of relativism according to which truth and reality are somehow dependent on human beings. But Rorty always claimed that he was not a relativist.
"Relativism" is
the traditional epithet applied to pragmatism by realists. Three different
views are commonly referred to by this name. The first is the view that every
belief is as good as every other. The second is the view that "true"
is an equivocal term, having as many meanings as there are procedures of
justification. The third is the view that there is nothing to be said about either
truth or rationality apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures of
justification which a given society-ours-uses in one or another area of
inquiry. The pragmatist holds the ethnocentric third view. But he does not hold
the self-refuting first view, nor the eccentric second view. He thinks that his
views are better than the realists, but he does not think that his views
correspond to the nature of things. He thinks that the very flexibility of the
word "true"-the fact that it is merely an expression of
commendation-insures its univocity. The term "true," on his account,
means the same in all cultures, just as equally flexible terms like
"here," "there," "good," "bad,"
"you," and "me" mean the same in all cultures. But the
identity of meaning is, of course, compatible with diversity of reference, and
with diversity of procedures for assigning the terms. So he feels free to use
the term "true" as a general term of commendation in the same way as
his realist opponent does-and in particular to use it to commend his own view.
However, it is not clear
why "relativist" should be thought an appropriate term for the
ethnocentric third view, the one which the pragmatist does hold. For the
pragmatist is not holding a positive theory which says that something is
relative to something else. He is, instead, making the purely negative point
that we should drop the traditional distinction between knowledge and opinion,
construed as the distinction between truth as correspondence to reality and
truth as a commendatory term for well-justified beliefs. The reason that the
realist calls this negative claim "relativistic" is that he cannot
believe that anybody would seriously deny that truth has an intrinsic nature.
So when the pragmatist says that there is nothing to be said about truth save
that each of us will commend as true those beliefs which he or she finds good
to believe, the realist is inclined to interpret this as one more positive
theory about the nature of truth: a theory according to which truth is simply
the contemporary opinion of a chosen individual or group. Such a theory would,
of course, be selfrefuting. But the pragmatist does not have a theory of truth,
much less a relativistic one. As a partisan of solidarity, his account of the
value of cooperative human inquiry has only an ethical base, not an
epistemological or metaphysical one. Not having any epistemology, a fortiori he does not have a
relativistic one.
One of Rorty’s harshest critics, Susan Haack, has described his distinctive brand of neo-pragmatism as “vulgar pragmatism.”
Rorty thinks there is much of value to be taken from the work of James and Dewey—but not from the work of Peirce. On his view, what is most valuable about James’s and Dewey’s pragmatism is their denial that philosophers ought to have theories of truth, knowledge, or morality. As long as we see James or Dewey as having “theories of truth” or “theories of knowledge” or “theories of morality” we shall get them wrong according to Rorty. We shall ignore their criticisms of the assumption that there ought to be theories about such matters.[6]
Rorty’s point seems to be that instead of thinking about truth in terms of correspondence or picturing, we should think about truth in terms of what it would be beneficial to believe.
There
are two principal ways in which reflective human beings try, by placing their
lives in a larger context, to give sense to those lives. The first is by
telling the story of their contribution to a community. …. The second way is to
describe themselves as standing in immediate relation to a nonhuman reality.
The first of these Rorty refers to as the desire for “Solidarity” and
the second as the desire for “objectivity.”
He divides philosophers into two camps: those that wish to ground
solidarity in objectivity and those who wish to ground objectivity in
solidarity.
…Those who wish to ground
solidarity in objectivity call them "realists"-have to construe truth
as correspondence to reality. So they must construct a metaphysics which has
room for a special relation between beliefs and objects which will
differentiate true from false beliefs. They also must argue that there are
procedures of justification of belief which are natural and not merely local.
So they must construct an epistemology which has room for a kind of
justification which is not merely social but natural, springing from human
nature itself, and made possible by a link between that part of nature and the
rest of nature. On their view, the various procedures which are thought of as
providing rational justification by one or another culture may or may not
really be rational. For to be truly rational, procedures of justification must
lead to the truth, to correspondence to reality, to the intrinsic nature of
things.
By contrast, those who
wish to reduce objectivity to solidarity-call them "pragmatists"-do
not require either a metaphysics or an epistemology. They view truth as, In
William James' phrase, what it is good for us to believe. So they do not need
an account of a relation between beliefs and objects called
"correspondence," nor an account of human cognitive abilities which
ensures that our species is capable of entering into that relation. They see
the gap between truth and justification not as something to be bridged by
isolating a natural and transcultural sort of rationality which can be used to
criticize certain cultures and praise others, but simply as the gap between the
actual good and the possible better.[7]
It is certain that Rorty intends a paradox:
“There is something philosophically interesting to be said about truth, namely that there is nothing philosophically interesting to be said about truth.'
But, of course, that way of putting the matter reminds us of is the relative nature of being 'philosophically interesting'.
Rorty does not restrict himself to the paradoxical formulation of the theory and proceeds to offer a more substantial account.
"For pragmatists, 'truth' is just the name of a property which all true statements share. It is what is common to 'Bacon did not write Shakespeare,' 'It rained yesterday,' 'E equals mc2,' 'Love is better than hate,' 'The Allegory of Painting was Vermeer's best work,' '2 plus 2 is 4,' and 'There are nondenumerable infinities.'
But Pragmatists doubt that there is much to be said about this common feature."
There are two claims embedded in the Pragmatic Theory of Truth (PTT) so conceived:
(1) truth is just the name of a property which all true statements share and
(2) there is not much to be said about that common feature.
The PTT appears nominalist. That is, it suggests the nominalist account that there is nothing which binds together the members of a group which we classify together other than the fact that we classify them together, presumably acting upon some (pragmatic) interest of ours.
That nominalism is suggested, I think, both by Rorty's dismissive "truth is just ..." and also by the second claim that there is not much to be said about truth.
However the nominalist appearance is misleading. For although he speaks dismissively, Rorty does say that truth is "the name of a property which all true statements share."
It is what is common to his set of enumerated truths. And that language is definitely not nominalist, in fact is definitely realist, Platonic in fact. Plato, pursuing Socrates, would have said or assumed precisely that about truth had he written a dialogue in which the central question was 'What is truth?'
Thus, far from having a philosophically uninteresting story to tell about truth, Rorty has enlisted himself, though with a hint of treason, to the Platonic, realist, story about truth.
Still, even if that philosophical aim is impossible with respect to truth (and given what we know of Rorty, it may well be impossible on general grounds), it is possible to make a philosophically interesting thesis of that: Rorty on truth is not far from G.E. Moore on the subject of 'good'. Moore said about 'good' that there is no definition of it; rather 'good' is the name of a simple non-natural property whose presence in any given instance must be apprehended by intuition.
Not, notice, that there is nothing to be said, just: not much. I presume that one thing Rorty means we can't to do is what Socrates hoped to do with common properties, namely spell out a definition of them (e.g. 'knowledge is true justified belief'.)
Hence in backing away from the Platonism of the first part of the PTT, Rorty does not get too far away at all. He ends up in an intuitionist version of Platonism. He can't be too happy about that.
THE LEGACY OF DEWEY
“Most of what I have written in the last decade
consists of attempts to tie in my social hopes – hopes for a global,
cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society – with my
antagonism towards Platonism. These attempts have been encouraged by the
thought that the same hopes, and the same antagonism, lay behind many of the
writings of my principal philosophical hero, John Dewey.”
Neopragmatism
> the provision of new vocabularies that help us to understand or solve a
given problem.
BEYOND METHAPYSICS
Metaphysics:
“to construct a perspective from outside as an attempt to escape from time, i.e. to view Being (Sein) as something that has little to do with Time (Zeit).
“the construction of the eternal in order to be free from the contingency, the uncertainty, and the fragility of the human condition.
Criticism:
there is no non-linguistic, pre-cognitive
access to an already present Being that underscores some narrative.
people are enmeshed in final vocabularies that
present Being in diverse and incommensurable ways.
there is no meta-vocabulary to distinguish the
adequacy of one final vocabulary above others.
What can
be done?
An
analysis of the heuristic value of metaphors!
The
heuristic value of ocular metaphors, especially the mirror, is limited.
“The picture which holds traditional philosophy
captive is that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various
representations – some accurate, some not – and capable of being studied by
pure, nonempirical methods. Without the notion of the mind as mirror, the
notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation would not have suggested
itself.”
Epistemology:
depends upon a picture of the mind as trying to
represent (i.e. mirror) a mind-independent external reality.
PHILOSOPHICAL TARGETS: Rorty attacks:
·
Platonic
essentialism.
·
Cartesian
foundationalism.
·
A
specific conception of philosophy.
Essentialism > looking for an everlasting
essence behind the phenomena that can be observed.
Foundationalism > to avoid the regress
inherent in claiming that all beliefs are justified by other beliefs and the
presupposition that some beliefs must be self-justifying and can be the
foundations of all knowledge. (Sellar’s
critique of the Myth of the given: there is no “given” in sensory perception.)
Philosophy is dissolving rather than solving
problems.
PHILOSOPHY AS CULTURAL POLITICS
Dissolving
problems is an act of cultural politics.
“The contribution to culture of philosophers is
not to discover the everlasting truth, but to create new vocabularies that are
helpful to interpret the world.”
Instead
of looking for the foundation of knowledge it’s better to accept that language,
the selfhood and the community is contingent and that many aspects of life are
optional. Philosophers should scrutinize the possibilities and limits of
vocabularies. Vocabularies describe and order the world in a different
way. The development of new vocabularies
implies the introduction of new metaphors.
BEYOND THE CORRESPONDENCE THEORY OF TRUTH
Rorty
criticizes in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature the correspondence
theory of truth > truth is not that what corresponds to reality.
Truth is
the qualification of opinions as ‘justified’ or ‘legitimate’.
Use
truth as an adjective (a truth story) and not as a substantive (the Truth).
Semantic
holism > the meaning of words and sentences are foremost related to the
meaning of other sentences and not to the non-linguistic world.
We
change our vocabularies and ideas about the truth because of changed habits.
THE IRONIST
Socrates
irony as
a means to figure out what is the truth.
Forms of
irony:
1.
Exaggeration : understatement.
2. Repetition.
3. Say
the opposite what you mean.
Rorty
argues that irony is not a means to figure out what is the truth, but a means
to question what is seen as “self-evident.”
The
ironist is a person that accepts that central aspects in life are contingent.
The
blind spot of epistemology: the contingencies in life.
Contingency:
what is
so by sheer accident; something which could have been otherwise.
CONTINGENCIES
Rorty
discusses three contingencies:
1. The
contingency of language.
2. The
contingency of selfhood.
3. The
contingency of a liberal community.
1.
THE
CONTINGENCY OF LANGUAGE
·
Wittgenstein
> showing the limits of language and therefore of a lifeworld.
·
An
individual is by birth thrown in a lifeworld that is characterized by a
specific use of language.
·
By
accident he or she learns a particular language.
·
And
by learning a particular language an individual acquires a world-view.
·
It
could have been another world-view.
·
Cultural
shifts are contingent changes of language.
2.
THE
CONTINGENCY OF SELFHOOD
·
Freud
> an individual is not a master of himself or a mistress of herself.
·
Individuals
are not fully conscious about who they are.
·
Psychoanalysis
challenges the idea of an autonomous selfhood.
·
The
selfhood is the product of upbringing and educational background.
·
Socialisation
and enculturation have a contingent character.
3.
THE
CONTINGENCY OF A LIBERAL COMMUNITY
Because
the selfhood of individuals is contingent the community life that is build upon
them is also contingent. If individuals accept that, they don’t have to look for the essence of the community in
which they are living. A liberal
community is open to the future and promotes conversation and not violence.
FINAL VOCABULARIES.
The
traditional ironist – for instance Socrates – is at the end a metaphysician who
is mainly interested in THE truth, (i.e. the essence behind phenomena.)
The
modern ironist is someone who knows that his or her final vocabulary is
contingent.
Final
vocabulary > words that an individual uses to justify his or her actions or
world-view.
The
ironist is someone who recognizes the three contingencies and has a commitment
to the reduction of all kinds of suffering, especially cruelty.
This
ironist is the opposite of the metaphysician.
3.
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE
CRUELTY
Central
question of Rorty’s political philosophy: what are the driving forces for our
political engagement?
Justice
or Equality? No!
Cruelty
> how to avoid it?
Solidarity
with all those who are the victims of cruelty.
People
should become sensitive to the way people get hurt.
Why are
people not susceptible to the global injustice?
AESTEHTICS AND MORAL THEORY
Beyond
the classical dichotomy of aesthetics (private) and moral theory (public).
The
relation between literature and morality is complex.
Literature
makes people sensible for moral dilemmas.
At first
glance there are a lot of differences between Nabokov and Orwell.
Nabokov
and Orwell > both give expression to cruelty and deal with the tension
between private irony and liberal hopes.
PATRIOTISM
Reiteration
of the work of John Dewey and Walt Whitman in order to criticize anti-liberal
and defeatist intellectuals.
Patriotism
> hold on to the liberal tradition.
To sides
of left:
1. critical
left
2. progressive
left.
To renew
the progressive (i.e. pragmatic) left.
Beyond
culturalism of the critical left, i.e. redescriptions that are mainly based on
cultural differences.
The flaw
of culturalism > the neglect of socio-economic inequalities.
SOCIAL HOPE
It is a
disaster when people grow up without hope.
Social
cohesion is based upon shared vocabularies and hope.
Philosophy
can help to (re)create oneself and is therefore a resource for hope.
“The main trouble is that you might succeed,
and your success might let you imagine that you have something more to rely on
than the tolerance and decency of your fellow human beings. The democratic
community of Dewey’s dreams is a community in which nobody imagines that.”
My suggestion that the
desire for objectivity is in part a disguised form of the fear of the death of
our community echoes Nietzsche's charge that the philosophical tradition which
stems from Plato is an attempt to avoid facing up to contingency, to escape
from time and chance. Nietzsche thought that realism was to be condemned not
only by arguments from its theoretical incoherence, the sort of argument we
find in Putnam and Davidson, but also on practical, pragmatic grounds.
Nietzsche thought that the test of human character was the ability to live with
the thought that there was no convergence. He wanted us to be able to think of
truth as:
a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms-in
short a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and
embellished poetically and rhetorically and which after long use seem firm,
canonical, and obligatory to a people.
Nietzsche hoped that
eventually there might be human beings who could and did think of truth in this
way, but who still liked themselves, who saw themselves as good people for whom
solidarity was enough.
I think that pragmatism's
attack on the various structure-content distinctions which buttress the
realist's notion of objectivity can best be seen as an attempt to let us think
of truth in this Nietzschean way, as entirely a matter of solidarity. That is
why I think we need to say, despite Putnam, that "there is only the
dialogue," only us, and to throw out the last residues of the notion of
“transcultural rationality.” But this should not lead us to repudiate, as
Nietzsche sometimes did, the elements in our movable host which embody the
ideas of Socratic conversation, Christian fellowship, and Enlightenment
science. Nietzsche ran together his diagnosis of philosophical realism as an
expression of fear and resentment with his own resentful idiosyncratic
idealizations of silence, solitude, and violence. Post-Nietzschean thinkers
like Adorno and Heidegger and Foucault have run together Nietzsche's criticisms
of the metaphysical tradition on the one hand with his criticisms of bourgeois
civility, of Christian love, and of the nineteenth century's hope that science
would make the world a better place to live, on the other. I do not think that
there is any interesting connection between these two sets of criticisms.
Pragmatism seems to me, as I have said, a philosophy of solidarity rather than
of despair. From this point of view, Socrates' turn away from the gods,
Christianity's turn from an Omnipotent Creator to the man who suffered on the
Cross, and the Baconian turn from science as contemplation of eternal truth to
science as instrument of social progress, can be seen as so many preparations
for the act of social faith which is suggested by a Nietzschean view of truth.
The best argument we
partisans of solidarity have against the realistic partisans of objectivity is
Nietzsche's argument that the traditional Western metaphysico-epistemological
way of firming up our habits simply isn't working anymore. It isn't doing its
job. It has become as transparent a device as the postulation of deities who
turn out, by a happy coincidence, to have chosen us as their people. So the
pragmatist suggestion that we substitute a "merely" ethical foundation
for our sense of community-or, better, that we think of our sense of community
as having no foundation except shared hope and the trust created by such
sharing-is put forward on practical grounds. It is not put forward as a
corollary of a metaphysical claim that the objects in the world contain no
intrinsically action-guiding properties, nor of an epistemological claim that
we lack a faculty of moral sense, nor of a semantical claim that truth is
reducible to justification
[1] [From Lecture II] Let me now say only this, that truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons. Surely you must admit this, that if there were NO good for life in true ideas, or if the knowledge of them were positively disadvantageous and false ideas the only useful ones, then the current notion that truth is divine and precious, and its pursuit a duty, could never have grown up or become a dogma. In a world like that, our duty would be toshun truth, rather. But in this world, just as certain foods are not only agreeable to our taste, but good for our teeth, our stomach and our tissues; so certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also helpful in life's practical struggles. If there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really better for us to believe in that idea, unless, indeed, belief in it incidentally clashed with other greater vital benefits.
[2] James, William: Pragmatism, p.119
[3] Rorty, Richard: “Pragmatism, Relativism and Irrationalism,” New Social Theory Reader: Contemporary Debates p.147
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid p. 149
[6] Some have countered that, on its face at least, this claim about James and Dewey just seems plain wrong. James made elaborate philosophical claims about truth (as well as about morality … see “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”). Dewey had quite a lot to say about the concepts knowledge and truth (as well as about associated concepts, like experience, and about morality).
[7] Rorty “Objectivity or Solidarity”