Taking sides: Richard Rorty vs a hot bowl of nourishing soup

"Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way."

"Everything, including giraffes and molecules, is socially constructed, for no vocabulary [...] cuts reality at the joints. Reality has no joints. It just has descriptions — some more socially useful than others."

"Philosophers on my side of the argument answer that objectivity is not a matter of corresponding to objects but a matter of getting together with other subjects — that there is nothing to objectivity except intersubjectivity."

I think most people would understand talking about "objective reality" as referring to things "as they really are", but Rorty denies that we can ever do that. I'm not clear whether he means there is no objective reality or that we simply can't refer to it (I imagine the latter would be too Kantian for him), but the objection remains. He cannot claim that anything he says objectively corresponds to a reality, he can only hope that it gains the status of truth through intersubjective agreement. But how are individual people to gauge its status of truth when they are explicitly told that it cannot correpond to an objective reality?

Rorty would say that we can't even say "there is no such thing as objective reality" -- even saying *that* would pre-suppose access to a God's-eye view of reality (his words).

But the meta-complaint against Rorty is if "truth" is about intersubjective agreement and not about corresponding with reality, his own case for the "truth" of his philosophy is a spectacularly weak one.

I just opened Truth & Progress - literally, I only took the cellophane off it this evening, having owned it for perhaps 18 months. It's not that much fun, though more fun than most philosophy.

Strikes me how deadpan he was, in a way - not when being obviously droll, but just in his standard low-key rhetoric:

"We see the point of formulating such summarizing generalizations as increasing the predictability, and thus the power and effiency, of our institutions, thereby heightening the sense of shared moral identity that brings us together in a moral community".

"efficency"

I knew I'd mistyped that somehow

I'm actually surprised by how unconvinced I feel by a lot of this book, so far. Even aside from the epistemology, which somehow isn't swaying me here, there's a moment at the start of the human rights essay where he declares his agreement with others' view that "for most men, being a woman does not count as one way of being human" (p.169). *Most* men? I don't even think he's talking about the 'most' of some global population which has all kinds of non-liberal gender beliefs (as against eg 'most men in the USA') - though if he were, it would still be a contentious claim.

Really slippery, and not that convincing somehow:

"We pragmatists argue from the fact that the emergence of the human rights culture seems to owe nothing to increased moral knowledge, and everything to hearing sad and sentimental stories, to the conclusion that there is probably no knowledge [of human nature, available]. We go on to argue that since no useful work seems to be done by insisting on a purportedly ahistorical human nature, there probably is no such nature" (p.172)

-- this all seems surprisingly wrong to me. It begs the question re. why the stories are sad, and affect us. What message or feeling do the stories deliver, exactly? If you asked people why the stories made them sad, might they not say something that implied a common humanity? And it doesn't seem good enough to say that if sth doesn't do what RR considers useful work, then it doesn't exist. I'm surprised to find myself so unconvinced by him.

Also: always (as on this page) drawing parallels between secular foundationalisms and religion. This seems rhetorical, knee-jerk stuff, an attempt at guilt by association.

Did I ever borrow Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, Bob, Carol, Ted & Alice from Jerry? If so, did I read it? Or give it back? I suppose we shall never know.

I'm currently doing a dissertation on Rorty and Levinas, trying to work my way around the fact that any point I make would have been met by Rorty with complete indifference. jerk!

Mike, I guess we have to ask whether the knowledge that you did or didn't does any useful work. If it doesn't, then I think we assume that it is something that we don't need to know and thus can't ever know. As you indeed say.

I know what you mean, though. Your borrowings of things like this are as obscure and shimmeringly shadowy as the nature of the thing-in-itself is for Kant, or as the offside rule is for everyone currently paid a salary to be a professional football pundit.

the pinefox, this is kind of random, but do you own a cell phone?

why, did someone just call you, out of the blue, and lament that Richard Rorty seems less convincing dead than he did alive?

I'm currently doing a dissertation on Rorty and Levinas, trying to work my way around the fact that any point I make would have been met by Rorty with complete indifference. jerk!

― Merdeyeux, Monday, March 17, 2008 9:48 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark

man, this interview is painful. so many meta/dodge non-answers to reasonable questions.

esp near the end

Sorry, I hate to sound harsh and mean and this is not the most constructive of posts but I just read a couple of his books and I found him nothing more than a comfy, pedestrian, self satisfied American parody of certain French philosophers (who were sometimes already a parody of certain other German philosophers...).

But he saw James and Dewey, more than Derrida or Foucault, as his real touchstones -- so the European stuff can probably be bracketed; for him, this was an American tradition in the first place.

It's the mix of good old anglo-american empirism and French theory that I found hard to stomach: especially because the final result has the unpleasant smell of Bentham's crass utilitarianism.