## Inbox - McDowell: "Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity". In Rorty and His Critics. - Pragmatism and it's Consequences, in Rorty and His Critics https://books.openedition.org/cdf/2135?lang=en - Another suggestion re Rorty - apparently Huw Price writes about this somewhere: 'Not sure he references Rorty in this, but it has his main argument and may point to where he does: Price, H. ‘Truth as Convenient Friction’ The Journal of Philosophy, Apr., 2003, Vol. 100, No. 4 It's online somewhere easily found.' - Conant Rorty Putnam - https://youtu.be/RnaaZOt78Ys - [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/) - Listennotes search? - New Yorker profile - LRB search - [https://www.lrb.co.uk/search-results?search=&all=richard%20rorty&any=&exclude=&phrase=&dateFrom=&dateTo=&oldsort=relevance&sort=relevance](https://www.lrb.co.uk/search-results?search=&all=richard%20rorty&any=&exclude=&phrase=&dateFrom=&dateTo=&oldsort=relevance&sort=relevance) - From page 1 of results - [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n22/bernard-williams/getting-it-right](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n22/bernard-williams/getting-it-right) - [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n20/jonathan-ree/strenuous-unbelief](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n20/jonathan-ree/strenuous-unbelief - [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n05/hilary-putnam/liberation-philosophy](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n05/hilary-putnam/liberation-philosophy) - [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n11/paul-seabright/conversations-with-rorty](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n11/paul-seabright/conversations-with-rorty) - [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n11/alasdair-macintyre/alasdair-macintyre-on-the-claims-of-philosophy](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n11/alasdair-macintyre/alasdair-macintyre-on-the-claims-of-philosophy) - [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n09/alexander-nehamas/untheory](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n09/alexander-nehamas/untheory) - [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n03/bernard-williams/terrestrial-thoughts-extraterrestrial-science](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n03/bernard-williams/terrestrial-thoughts-extraterrestrial-science) - [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n12/tim-crane/fraught-with-ought](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n12/tim-crane/fraught-with-ought) - https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n02/steven-shapin/dear-prudence - YouTube search ## Philosophy Bites Talisse Encourage us to stand unflinchingly for our commitments, even once we've realised that there is no philosophical justification that can be given for them, that all the justifications are just circular, just restatements of what people who are like us say. Rorty: all views are relativist, there's no alternative. It's just that some are self deluded and think they are not relative. Pragmatism like Wittgenstein is trying to cure us of certain unrealistic aspirations. ## Appreciation of Derrida https://news.stanford.edu/news/1999/april21/rortytext-421.html Derrida will be seen as having continued a sequence which runs from Hegel through Nietzsche to Heidegger and Wittgenstein. In these men's writings, Socratic doubt is turned against Platonic metaphysics. What Derrida calls "the metaphysics of presence" -- the intellectual tradition that goes back to Parmenides and Plato -- tells us that beyond humanity, and immune to historical and cultural change, there is something to which humanity owes respect. This is something which we have a duty to make clearly and distinctly present to our minds. It is, as Derrida has put it, "a fixed presence beyond the reach of play." Sometimes this thing is called God, sometimes the intrinsic nature of physical reality, sometimes the moral law, and sometimes the underlying structure of all possible human thought. To disentangle oneself from the metaphysics of presence would be to move into an intellectual world which would be humanistic in a far fuller sense than were the worlds of Renaissance Platonists or the Enlightenment secularists. For the Renaissance believed that the source of human salvation lies outside of any actual or possible human community, and the Enlightenment believed that natural science puts in touch with the true nature of something made by no human hand. A fuller humanism would say, with Yeats, "Whatever flames upon the night/Man's own resinous heart has fed." For such a humanism, there would be no source of authority, and no proper object of respect, save products of the human creative imagination. These products include Newtonian physics, Augustinian theology, Darwinian biology and Kantian ethics as well as the poems of Schiller, the politics of Jefferson and the irony of Socrates. To evade the metaphysics of presence would be to see all of these as poetic achievements: examples of our ability to recreate ourselves by using new words. A culture which saw art and science, politics and religion, morality and education, in this way would be as different from ours as the culture envisaged by Plato was from the culture of Periclean Athens. If such a culture ever comes into existence, it will look back to Professor Derrida as one of those who prepared the way. Heirs of Socrates have been expressing doubts about Plato's metaphysics for a long time. Examples of such doubts are Hegel's historicism, Schiller's and Nietzsche's aestheticism, Dewey's pragmatism, Heidegger's revisionary account of Plato as a proto-Nietzschean, and Wittgenstein's and Davidson's treatment of language as a means for coordinating human action, rather than as a means of representing the non-human. ## Trotsky and the Wild Orchids (1992 intellectual autobiography) https://cdclv.unlv.edu/pragmatism/rorty_orchids.html For quite a while after I read Hegel, I thought that the two greatest achievements of the species to which I belonged were The Phenomenology of Spirit and Remembrance of Things Past (the book which took the place of the wild orchids once I left Flatbrookville for Chicago ). Proust's ability to weave intellectual and social snobbery together with the hawthorns around Combray, his grandmother's selfless love, Odette's orchidaceous embraces of Swann and Jupien's of Charlus, and with everything else he encountered – to give each of these its due without feeling the need to bundle them together with die help of a religious faith or a philosophical theory - seemed to me as astonishing as Hegel's ability to throw himself successively into empiricism, Greek tragedy, Stoicism, Christianity and Newtonian physics, and to emerge from each, ready and eager for something completely different. It was the cheerful commitment to irreducible temporality which Hegel and Proust shared – the specifically anti – Platonic element in their work – that seemed so wonderful. They both seemed able to weave everything they encountered into a narrative without asking that that narrative have a moral, and without asking how that narrative would appear under the aspect of eternity. About 20 years or so after I decided that the young Hegel's willingness to stop trying for eternity, and just be the child of his time, was [12] the appropriate response to disillusionment with Plato, I found myself being led back to Dewey. Dewey now seemed to me a philosopher who had learned all that Hegel had to teach about how to eschew certainty and eternity, while immunizing himself against pantheism by taking Darwin seriously. [...] I decided to write a book about what intellectual life might be like if one could manage to give up the Platonic attempt to hold reality and justice in a single vision. That book - Contingency, Irony and Solidarity – argues that there is no need to weave one's personal equivalent of Trotsky and one's personal equivalent of my wild orchids together. Rather, one should try to abjure the temptation to tie in one's moral responsibilities to other people with one's relation to whatever idiosyncratic things or persons one loves with all one's heart and soul and mind (or, if you like, the things or persons one is obsessed with). The two will, for some people, coincide – as they do in those lucky Christians for whom the love of God and of other human beings are inseparable, or revolutionaries who are moved by nothing save the thought of social justice. But they need not coincide, and one should not try too hard to make them do so. So for example, Jean-Paul Sartre seemed to me right when he denounced Kant's self-deceptive quest for certainty, but wrong when he denounced Proust as a useless bourgeois wimp, a man whose life and writings were equally irrelevant to the only thing that really mattered, the struggle to overthrow capitalism. Proust's life and work were, in fact, irrelevant to that struggle. But that is a silly reason to despise Proust. It is as wrong-headed as Savonarola's contempt for the works of art he called 'vanities'. Singlemindedness of this Sartrean or Savonarolan sort is the quest for purity of heart – the attempt to will one thing – gone rancid. It is the attempt to see yourself as an incarnation of something larger than yourself (the Movement, Reason, the Good, the Holy) rather than accepting your finitude. The latter means, among other things, accepting that what matters most to you may well be something that may never matter much to most people. Your equivalent of my orchids may always seem merely weird, merely idiosyncratic, to practically everybody else. But that is no reason to be ashamed of, or downgrade, or try to slough off, your Wordsworthian moments, your lover, your family, your pet, your favourite lines of verse, or your quaint religious faith. There is nothing sacred about universality which makes the shared [14] Automatically better than the unshared. There is no automatic privilege of what you can get everybody to agree to (the universal) over what you cannot (the idiosyncratic). This means that the fact that you have obligations to other people (not to bully them, to join them in overthrowing tyrants, to feed them when they are hungry) does not entail that what you share with other people is more important than anything else. What you share with them, when you are aware of such moral obligations, is not, I argued in Contingency, 'rationality' or 'human nature' or 'the fatherhood of God' or 'a knowledge of the Moral Law', or anything other than ability to sympathize with the pain of others. There is no particular reason to expect that your sensitivity to that pain, and your idiosyncratic loves, are going to fit within one big overall account of how everything hangs together. There is, in short, not much reason to hope for the sort of single vision that I went to college hoping to get. [...] If I had not read all those books, I might never have been able to stop looking for what Derrida calls 'a full presence beyond the reach of play', for a luminous, self-justifying, self-sufficient synoptic vision. By now I am pretty sure that looking for such a presence and such a vision is a bad idea. 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. It is a community in which everybody thinks that it is human solidarity, rather than knowledge of something not merely human, that really matters. The actually existing approximations to such a fully democratic, fully secular community now seem to me the greatest achievements of our species. In comparison, even Hegel's and Proust's books seem optional, orchidaceous extras. ## Bernard Williams reviewing Rorty https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n22/bernard-williams/getting-it-right ## Rorty reviewing Richard Posner http://web.archive.org/web/20120723060901/http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=472 It is not for nothing that our democracy has been seen, by millions of people throughout the last two centuries, as more than just another arena of competition between interest groups. The United States has not been a beacon of hope for the world merely because American voters have been able to fire politicians who fouled up. Our country's self-image is still shaped, and its history is still being molded, by a Lincolnesque narrative of moral progress-progress made by appeals to the better angels of our nature. Posner's account of how the American political system works has no room for heroes and heroines of this narrative such as Susan B. Anthony, Eugene V. Debs, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Thurgood Marshall, Betty Friedan, and Lincoln himself. These people were, to be sure, clever politicians who knew how to work the system. But they were also utopian dreamers-the sort of people for whom Posner has little use. They were able to change people's ideas about where their interests lay, and thus to create and mobilize new interest groups. By doing so, they made their country different and better. [...] Posner is so suspicious of romance and idealism-far more suspicious than Tocqueville ever was-that he has trouble conceding that either has played a role in our political history. [...] Most of the time American democracy is a matter of pragmatic compromise between interest groups. But occasionally it is much more than that. It is those latter moments that we have in mind when we explain to our children what a great thing it is to be an American. ## Rorty on Enlightened Opinions The trouble with metaphysics is that anyone can say anything and get away with it. Philosophers since Plato have claimed there's a set of super rules we can use to tell good human practices from bad human practices. I don't think there's anything like that. Reformers: John Stuart Mill, Isiah Berlin, John Dewey, Jurgen Habermas… think that in the last 200 years since the French Revolution, human beings in the west pretty much discovered how human life ought to be lived. It ought to be lived with as much individual freedom as possible under as democratic a government as possible. The last word on human society was given by JSM in On Liberty. Revolutionaries: this was a disaster, something radically wrong with modernity, bourgeois liberalism, secular society. Focualt, Badiou. It's all oppression, we haven't really made any progress, it's somehow a fraud. Nietzsche, Heidegger. The Last Men are people who have their little pleasures in the day and their little pleasures in the night, but they don't aim for greatness, they have no conception of greatness. **Reformers think it's okay to not have a conception of greatness. It's ok to just think about maximising human happiness.** Nietzsche and Heidegger thought that was an ignoble idea. Not all men live for happiness, only Englishmen do. Rorty: quietist and a reformer. Bourgeois society had put us on the right track, best we can hope for is globalisation of the kind of society we've created in the west. America should become more like Norway and the world should become more like America. Statue of liberty is the best thing humanity has come up with so far. It's done more for us than the Buddha ever did. Harrison: How do we know that? Rorty: History. There is nothing rotten about borgeois liberal democracy. Capitalism is okay as long as it is accompanied by liberal institutions like a welfare state. Marx, Nietzsche Heidegger are genuisues but overall attidue sense that something is radically wrong is misguided. Philip Roth novel clashes The Plot Against America. Easy to imagine after a terrorist nuclear attack we'll lose our liberties overnight. Rorty suspects that such an attack is inevitable, and if that happens, all bets are off. Before 9/11 I didn't realise how many warheads there are floating around the world that could be used on American cities, now I think it's overwhelmingly likely. Not the fault of bourgeois liberal democracy, but nations that did not get rid of nuclear weapons in 1946. If we don't develop nuclear fusion or something like that, we've had it. Suppose we found out we were all going to be destroyed by an asteroid. Would you want philosophers to start thinking about asteroids? Surely this is a matter for the engineers rather than the philosophers. The topic of humanities place on earth seems like too large a topic to think about. Suppose you question the social democratic humanist assumption: what are the alternatives? Harrison: maybe reread Thoreau, revisit the idea of voluntary poverty. Erlich: there are not too many people in the world, there are too many rich people. Harrison: what kind of authority does a philosophy bring to questions of the social and the political? Rorty: none whatever. on my view you start with the political and go from there to philosophy. You don't try to backup the political with philosophy. ## [http://philosophizethis.org/episode-142-transcript/](http://philosophizethis.org/episode-142-transcript/) ### Selected highlights **“we need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be out there – cannot exist independently of the human mind – because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own – unaided by the describing activities of human beings – cannot.”** This is one of Rorty’s most famous concepts. What many refer to as the distinction between making and finding. Locke and Kant are not FINDING the truth about human rights…they are using a very human process called REASON to MAKE a truth about human rights that we’d then use to structure our societies. **Liberalism was not FOUND to be the best political strategy…historical circumstances and common values among people MADE it the best political strategy for a time. When you read a thousand books you are not FINDING the truth about existence, you are MAKING a final vocabulary that allows you to interface with reality during the specific time that you happen to be living.** **By final vocabulary Rorty means a collection of stories, metaphors, narratives, discourses, tons of different tools of rhetoric… that you use to make sense of the world and see your place in it**. This is called a FINAL vocabulary because the things that make it up are very final…they’re probably not going to develop any further because when it comes down to it…if you were pressed hard enough to explain your worldview by somebody skilled enough at arguing, with enough time on their hands…Rorty says eventually there would be no way for you to explain why YOUR worldview is better anyone else’s in a non-circular way. When pressed hard enough to justify your worldview in a conversation these are the sorts of stories and metaphors that ground the values of someone who thinks they’ve got it all figured out. Many people spend their entire lives thinking they’ve arrived at the truth…when the more accurate description is that they’ve set up camp in an echo chamber of people that don’t call them on their mistakes…either because they only talk to people who mostly agree with them, or because the people that disagree with them lack the ability to press them further, maybe they want to just be polite, maybe they just don’t CARE enough about changing someone into a LITTLE version of them to spend their time doing it. ### All highlights the early 20th century was full of thinkers dissatisfied with what the Enlightenment had produced. They even went so far as to say that the entire PROJECT of the Enlightenment…was destined to consume itself from the start. Yeah, sure at the beginning REASON calls into question much of the religious dogma of the middle ages…but what inevitably has to happen once it gets done with THAT job…is REASON has to start questioning the NEW foundations for things…reason has to start questioning…itself. Which, then leads to philosophers USING the process of rationality…to find out that rationality is not some unbiased, ahistorical measuring tool…it’s not some “neutral point” from which we can make unambiguous claims about the TRUTH about human rights or more importantly, THE UNIVERSE. To the thinker we’re going to be covering today, Richard Rorty…people like Locke and Kant were NO MORE discovering a Truth about what grounds human rights than Hammurabi was before them. But UNLIKE many of the thinkers of the early 20th century…who may have felt a bit disenfranchised by the rational process…Richard Rorty felt optimistic about rationality. The spirit of the Enlightenment, to Rorty, was not to use reason to arrive at the TRUTH about the universe…it was ultimately a call to subvert traditional forms of authority. The significance of the Enlightenment was NOT to land on new answers…it was to question old assumptions. So in that sense…yeah, the INITIAL project of the Enlightenment ultimately consumed itself, but to Richard Rorty the initial project of the Enlightenment was MEANT to consume itself. Thinkers like Isaiah Berlin that would come along and suggest a Pluralistic vision of things…this wasn’t an anti-enlightenment idea at all…to Rorty…this WAS the project of the Enlightenment left to play itself out…thinkers like Berlin were ALWAYS going to eventually come along. See the project of the Enlightenment MATURING through people like Isaiah Berlin, taught us a couple of EXTREMELY valuable insights. One of which, was that **we don’t need to try to use reason to appeal to some ultimate authority or universal to GROUND our ideas. Rationality, is not a tool that gets us to objectivity about things…but it MAY get us to a VERY EFFECTIVE mix of inter-subjectivity between cultures.** we’re just trying to figure out how we can live together the best…maybe THAT is where rationality thrives as a method. The fact is to Rorty: we don’t need that sort of ULTIMATE FOUNDATION to be able to make a case for the fact that Liberalism is how we should be running things. For many different reasons, one as has been said, we can’t actually ACCESS the universe at that level through rationality. Two, society is just far better off when it can base public policy on the rational consensus of individual citizens rather than some philosophical theory arrived at by some guy in a tower that people might not even be able to relate to. Think of the limitations you INSTANTLY place on yourself if you decide that every public policy or VALUE of a society needs to be grounded in some philosophical justification that tells you how human beings are AT LARGE. maybe a strategy is legitimate if the people of that society decide that they have confidence in it. One ultimate theory is not good enough. **Rorty, who was a HUGE fan of Isaiah Berlin, sometimes talks in his work about the “fact of Pluralism”. This is WHAT a society is, to Rorty. We are WORSE OFF as a society if we try to use a single religious or philosophical theory to justify our political strategy.** You will ALWAYS be fighting a losing battle…people will ALWAYS arrive at a BUNCH of different conclusions…so instead of embarking on a never ending sales campaign for an idea…Rorty suggests that we allow our political strategy to reflect the common values of the people that make up the culture. Rorty is often thought of as a Pragmatist, COMMON theories of what constitutes truth from the history of philosophy…one that Richard Rorty thought has been dominant since the very beginning of the Enlightenment…what he sometimes calls the representationalist paradigm…sometimes called by others the correspondence theory of truth…but let ME take a second to tell you what it actually is. **The most basic idea is that suppose somebody says a statement about the way that things are in the world. How do we tell if that statement is true? Well that statement is true if it REPRESENTS the way things really ARE in the world. If there is a CORRESPONDENCE between the description and reality, then we can say it’s true.** Now…there is of course mountains of detail that we could talk about here but Richard Rorty disagrees with the entire PREMISE of the correspondence theory even at this basic, rudimentary level. Language MEDIATES our relationship with reality. You can’t access reality WITHOUT language. But to Rorty it goes even one step further than this. Not only is language a medium between us and reality…but language actually CONSTITUTES reality. Meaning that the language we use and the way we use it CHANGES the way we THINK about reality. the point is that certain languages and the cultures that use them favor certain habits of interpreting events. These interpretations greatly determine the entire way we see reality and the WAY human beings perceive reality varies greatly from culture to culture, language to language. So the idea…that there is some sort of correspondence or representation going on… that the world out there is somehow helping us verify whether statements are true or false…that’s just wrong…because Rorty thinks it would be impossible for us to ever step outside of the parameters of language and access the world of things in themselves, things independent of this language that we use to categorize them. “The world does not speak. only we do. the world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only human beings can do that.” language is EXTREMELY useful in human affairs…it’s just not capable of describing the world of things in themselves outside of language. Consider how this compares to the beginning of the episode. We have Locke and Kant trying to use reason to access some sort of ultimate TRUTH about the universe…but here’s Rorty saying that rationality is the MOST useful in HUMAN affairs like the realm of the political. The WORLD does not speak, only we do. Here’s another one from the Enlightenment…people like Rousseau…who believe in some sort of underlying human nature, Noble Savages as he would say…or really beyond that ANYONE that wants to take up the mantle of the common attitude that human beings at their very core DREAD seeing other human beings suffer. That’s a common one for people to hold…that NATURALLY as human beings we don’t want to see other people in pain, so we can RELY on the fact that if things ever got bad enough one culture would always come to the aid of another culture. Rorty actually responds to this position directly in an interaction with Simon Critchley in the 90’s. So right here he is referencing the idea that there is some sort of default altruism embedded into human nature…he says: “Maybe there is such a sentient disposition, but it is so malleable – so capable of being combined with indifference to the suffering of people of the wrong sorts – that it gives us precious little to rely on. We should just thank our lucky stars that there are quite a lot of people nowadays who are pretty consistently appalled by human beings suffering unnecessarily.” **how am I supposed to ground my worldview in ANYTHING that is enduring enough that I can feel confident about it? **The short answer to this question is that: you can’t. And that shouldn’t bother you.**** The longer answer can be found in Rorty’s lengthy exploration of the concept of irony. To fully understand the life of an ironist, though, we first need to understand the much more common almost ubiquitous way that people approach figuring things out about the world…a way of thinking deeply embedded in the history of philosophy. Most people view their intellectual development as a person as a linear progression of moving PAST appearances…and getting to the REALITY of the world. This goes all the way back to Plato’s allegory of the Cave…shadows on a cave wall, we do the work of a philosopher and eventually can ascend OUT of the cave and see the sun, or TRUE knowledge, for what it actually is. Well this way of viewing ourselves has been a fixture in our cultures for so long that it is the way that MANY people see their process of growth when learning about the world. There’s this intuitive sense that we’re born, we’re young, dumb, naive…we get information from our teachers, parents, basic news sources and there’s a sense in which we are living in a world of appearances at that point. See it’s not until we’ve done the work of reading five newspapers a day, 1000 books, traveled to 100 countries…not until we’ve done THAT can we say that we’ve arrived at a worldview that sees reality on reality’s terms. But just as there’s no SINGLE THEORY embedded into the universe about human rights, or political strategy or ANYTHING for that matter…there’s no single, correct view of existence that you’re somehow accessing through life experiences and reading a bunch of stuff. You may THINK that you have a rational justification for every view that you hold…you may think it’s the greatest worldview that has ever been created…but it was created…by you…BY a human being…and **Rorty would say that although we often DECEIVE ourselves into THINKING it’s the truth…really what we’ve created here is what he calls a final vocabulary. ** **“we need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be out there – cannot exist independently of the human mind – because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own – unaided by the describing activities of human beings – cannot.”** This is one of Rorty’s most famous concepts. What many refer to as the distinction between making and finding. Locke and Kant are not FINDING the truth about human rights…they are using a very human process called REASON to MAKE a truth about human rights that we’d then use to structure our societies. **Liberalism was not FOUND to be the best political strategy…historical circumstances and common values among people MADE it the best political strategy for a time. When you read a thousand books you are not FINDING the truth about existence, you are MAKING a final vocabulary that allows you to interface with reality during the specific time that you happen to be living.** **By final vocabulary Rorty means a collection of stories, metaphors, narratives, discourses, tons of different tools of rhetoric… that you use to make sense of the world and see your place in it**. This is called a FINAL vocabulary because the things that make it up are very final…they’re probably not going to develop any further because when it comes down to it…if you were pressed hard enough to explain your worldview by somebody skilled enough at arguing, with enough time on their hands…Rorty says eventually there would be no way for you to explain why YOUR worldview is better anyone else’s in a non-circular way. When pressed hard enough to justify your worldview in a conversation these are the sorts of stories and metaphors that ground the values of someone who thinks they’ve got it all figured out. Many people spend their entire lives thinking they’ve arrived at the truth…when the more accurate description is that they’ve set up camp in an echo chamber of people that don’t call them on their mistakes…either because they only talk to people who mostly agree with them, or because the people that disagree with them lack the ability to press them further, maybe they want to just be polite, maybe they just don’t CARE enough about changing someone into a LITTLE version of them to spend their time doing it. Rorty prescribes an antidote to this way of thinking about getting past appearances to the reality of the world. Here is a pretty famous passage from his work that describes his three criteria for living a life as an ironist: **“I shall define an ironist as someone who fulfills three conditions: ** 1 She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; 2 She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts. 3 Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal meta-vocabulary not by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old.” So imagine living life as an ironist as opposed to this other type of person we were just talking about. You’d live your day to day life not like Phyrro in ancient athens walking in front of cars because you’re doubting whether or not they’re actually there…you’d HAVE a sort of working theory, a final vocabulary that you use to function…the DIFFERENCE would be that you would have seen OTHER final vocabularies, seen their weaknesses, and you would realize that yours is probably EQUALLY as flawed as there’s in some way. Because you don’t have SPECIAL access to the truth…you don’t have a diety backing your worldview…you don’t have some neutral point outside of culture and history that you’re doing your thinking from. You are JUST as fallible as they are and your conclusions rely on history and culture JUST as much as there’s do. You would have continuing radical doubt about your relationship with reality. This is why Rorty thinks that when it comes to our final vocaublaries…ARGUING in the traditional sense is not a very effective way of making any progress. Rorty says that an ironist always realizes “that anything can be made to look good or bad by being re-described”. Because **it’s not like there is some SINGLE, argumentative standard out there…winning an argument in the times of Napolean is just different than winning an argument today…because the values of the people judging have changed, the historical circumstances have changed, the story about how the world fits together has changed…different arguments are more effective in different final vocabularies. So ARGUING is ALWAYS relying on your points fitting well into the final vocabulary of whoever it is you’re talking to**— which is FAR from a guarantee…and the OTHER side of that is that you may find yourself CONSTANTLY arguing against a particular, COMMON final vocabulary that happens to dominate the culture you were born into. Better to instead LEAD by example through irony. When someone thinks they’ve lassoed the truth with their vocabulary…the far more effective method will ALWAYS be to do what Rorty calls: ironic disruption…which doesn’t mean pull our your Richard Rorty handbook and argue them down point by point until they see the world the way you do…the goal is through one method or another, usually rhetorical devices…you try to allow this person to see on their own…the perspective from OUTSIDE their single worldview…the hope being that once they’re in this place they will realize how limiting their basic way of viewing the world is because it COMPLETELY closes them off from new ways of connecting with people, ideas, and the world that is out there, once again the WORLD that is out there…not the TRUTH that is out there. To be in this place stepping outside of your worldview and seeing a COMPLETELY different way the world can be rationally justified…can be transformative. Should be said this process also benefits the ironist because they need AS MUCH experience with final vocabularies as they can get. They need to be able to spot them from a mile away. **Rorty says in a passage that an ironist is “never quite able to take themselves seriously”. Because they live their life acknowledging how much of their final vocabulary wasn’t even a choice that THEY consciously made…and that at any point some of the issues that they believe in most strongly today… might tomorrow, change in a single conversation.** This is a very different approach to your intellectual development, and a VERY different way of approaching conversations with people that disagree with you politically. Rorty would say that these people that truly believe they are reading books and getting past the world of appearances to the TRUE reality of things…this outdated, oversimplified attitude is responsible for SO MUCH of the CRUELTY that goes on in this world. Liberal society, in his eyes, has a constant obligation to remind ourselves of the ways that the current order of things might be hurting the people around us. Much more effective with a Pluralistic outlook. You know, there are relativists that will try to make an argument for people to stop fighting over their petty disagreements because ultimately everything is arbitrary…**there are Rationalists that will say that everyone should stop fighting because well I’ve come up with the RIGHT ANSWER, no more work to be done! The way that Richard Rorty walks the line of nature and culture is partially through his beautiful use of Pragmatism. Rorty wouldn’t say you should care less. He wouldn’t say you should care more. What he would say I think is that the substance of what we care about…LIES in solidarity amongst fellow human beings. That solidarity is what keeps us in line, not a cosmic law. That solidarity is what determines our values, not some philosopher in a tower.** To understand the historical and cultural environment that you live in is only the FIRST STEP towards understanding the solidarity that holds society together. He said it well when describing his book here in one of the most famous passages from his work: **“the fundamental premise of this book is that a belief can still regulate action, can still be worth dying for among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing more than contingent historical circumstances”** ## [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/) Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The centerpiece of Rorty's critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty's principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. 2. Against epistemology On Rorty's account, modern epistemology is not only an attempt to legitimate our claim to knowledge of what is real, but also an attempt to legitimate philosophical reflection itself—a pressing task, on many accounts, once the advent of the so-called new science of the sixteenth and seventeenth century gradually gave content to a notion of knowledge obtained by the methodological interrogation of nature herself [empiricism]. Because the result of this kind of interrogation, theoretical empirical knowledge, is so obviously fruitful, and also carries with it seemingly uncontentious norms of progress, its mere presence poses a legitimation challenge to a form of thought, and claim to knowledge, that is distinct from it. Cartesian epistemology, in Rorty's picture, is designed to meet this challenge. It is sceptical in a fundamental way; sceptical doubts of a Cartesian sort, that is, doubts that can be raised about any set of empirical claims whatever, and so cannot be alleviated by experience, are tailor-made to preserve at once a domain and a job for philosophical reflection. Rorty's aim in PMN is to undermine the assumptions in light of which this double legitimation project makes sense. Epistemological behaviorism Rorty's key claim is that "the Kantian picture of concepts and intuitions getting together to produce knowledge is needed to give sense to the idea of ‘theory of knowledge’ as a specifically philosophical discipline, distinct from psychology." (PMN 168). Epistemology, in Rorty's account, is wedded to a picture of mind's structure working on empirical content to produce in itself items—thoughts, representations—which, when things go well, correctly mirror reality. To loosen the grip of this picture on our thinking is to challenge the idea that epistemology—whether traditional Cartesian or 20th century linguistic—is the essence of philosophy. To this end, Rorty combines a reading of Quine's attack on a version of the structure-content distinction in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1952), with a reading of Sellars' attack on the idea of givenness in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956/1997). On Rorty's reading, though neither Sellars nor Quine is able fully to take in the liberating influence of the other, they are really attacking the same distinction, or set of distinctions. While Quine casts doubt on the notion of structure or meaning which linguistically-turned epistemology had instated in place of mental entities, Sellars, questioning the very idea of givenness, came at the distinction from the other side: …Sellars and Quine invoke the same argument, one which bears equally against the given-versus-nongiven and the necessary-versus-contingent distinctions. The crucial premise of this argument is that we understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation. (PMN 170) The upshot of Quine's and Sellars' criticisms of the myths and dogmas of epistemology is, Rorty suggests, that "we see knowledge as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature." (PMN 171) Rorty provides this view with a label: "Explaining rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say, rather than the latter by the former, is the essence of what I shall call ‘epistemological behaviorism,’ an attitude common to Dewey and Wittgenstein." (PMN 174) many who share Rorty's historicist scepticism toward the transcending ambitions of epistemology—friendly critics like Hilary Putnam, John McDowell and Daniel Dennett—balk at the idea that there are no constraints on knowledge save conversational ones. Yet this is a central part of Rorty's position, repeated and elaborated as recently as in TP and PCP. Indeed, in TP he invokes it precisely in order to deflect this sort of criticism. In "Hilary Putnam and the Relativist Menace," Rorty says: In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which "the Relativist" keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try. (TP 57) That epistemological behaviorism differs from traditional forms of relativism and subjectivism is easier to see in light of Rorty's criticism of the notion of representation, and the cluster of philosophical images which surround it. 2.2 Antirepresentationalism Rorty's enduring attitude to relativism and subjectivism is that both are products of the representationalist paradigm. Drawing on Davidson's criticism of the scheme-content distinction ("On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme") and of the correspondence theory of truth ("The Structure and Content of Truth"), Rorty is able to back up his rejection of any philosophical position or project which attempts to draw a general line between what is made and what is found, what is subjective and what is objective, what is mere appearance and what is real. Rorty's position is not that these conceptual contrasts never have application, but that such application is always context and interest bound and that there is, as in the case of the related notion of truth, nothing to be said about them in general. Rorty's commitment to the conversationalist view of knowledge must therefore be distinguished from subjectivism or relativism, which, Rorty argues, presuppose the very distinctions he seeks to reject. Equally, Rorty's epistemological behaviorism must not be confused with an idealism that asserts a primacy of thought or language with respect to the unmediated world, since this, too, is a position that is undercut by Rorty's Davidsonian position. In light of the view of truth and of meaning that Rorty appropriates from Davidson, his conversationalism is not a matter of giving priority to the subjective over the objective, or to mind's power over world's constraint. Rather it is the other side of his anti-representationalism, which denies that we are related to the world in anything other than causal terms. Differently put, Rorty argues that we can give no useful content to the notion that the world, by its very nature, rationally constrains choices of vocabulary with which to cope with it. ### 2022-05-11 note Revisiting my [highlights](https://sun.pjh.is/richard-rorty-reviews-truth-and-truthfulness-by-bernard-williams) from Richard Rorty's wonderful review of Bernard William's book, _Truth and Truthfulness_. Rorty points out that Williams shares a lot in common with the pragmatist, and admits that he is "puzzled" as to why Williams is so reluctant to embrace the pragmatic story about truth. Williams wants us to regard truth and the virtues of truthfulness (commitment to accuracy and sincerity) as intrinsically valuable—not just a means to other values. Criticising pragmatism, Williams writes that we: > ...need to take seriously the idea that to the extent that we lose a sense of the value of truth, we shall certainly lose something, and may well lose everything. Why is Williams so reluctant to embrace pragmatism? X, writing in NDPR, thinks that the argument goes like this: > (a) we can’t get along without trust (human flourishing creates a “need for cooperation” > (b) but trust requires truthfulness, and > (c) truthfulness presupposes that there are (at least some) truths. Truthfulness—a commitment to accuracy and sincerity—doesn't obviously require a Rorty wants us to think of philosophers as "hard-working public relations agents for contemporary institutions and practices"—and not as "independent experts whose endorsement of our present ways of justifying beliefs is based on a superior knowledge of what it is for various propositions to be true". I need to read more of the book, but for now I'll just state my current guess: he has a pragmatic / consequentialist / genealogical story about why the idea of "truth as intrinsically valuable" is important. Perhaps the thought is: without it, cultures become so heterogenous that collaboration is impeded. Or perhaps: individuals give themselves too much license. Or perhaps: trust becomes impossible. Two virtues of truthfulness: > **Accuracy** is the virtue of carefully investigating and deliberating over the evidence for and against a belief before assenting to it; **sincerity** is the virtue of genuinely expressing to others what one in fact believes. X thinks that Williams doesn't make a plausible case for (c). He is "puzzled" by Williams