Part I
Solidarity or objectivity? 21
Science as solidarity 35
Is natural science a natural kind? 46
Pragmatism without method 63
Texts and lumps 78
Inquiry as recontextualization: An anti-dualist account of interpretation 93
Part II
Non-reductive physicalism 113
Pragmatism, Davidson and truth 126
Representation, social practise, and truth 151
Unfamiliar noises: Hesse and Davidson on metaphor 162
Part III
The priority of democracy to philosophy 175
Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism 197
On ethnocentrism: A reply to Clifford Geertz 203
Cosmopolitanism without emancipation: A response to Jean-Francois Lyotard 211
DEWEYAN: Rorty discusses what Donald Davidson means by reflecting on a belief. "...it is reflection on how a language-using organism interacts with what is going on its [sic] neighborhood. Like Dewey, Davidson takes off from Darwin rather than from Descartes: from beliefs as adaptations to the environment rather than as quasi-picutures....[Davidson] thinks of beliefs as habits of acting rather than as parts of a 'model' of the world constructed by the organism to help it deal with the world." (p.10)
Davidson [and others] "do not accept the Cartesian-Kantian picture presupposed by the idea of 'our minds' or 'our language' as an 'inside' which can be contrasted to something...'outside.'" (p. 12)
RORTY'S AMBITION: "My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have what Nagel calls 'an ambition of transcendence.'" (p.12)
Part I
Solidarity or objectivity? (pp21-34)
PRAGMATISM AS ANTI-MODERNISM: In this essay Rorty explains what PRAGMATISTS like him believe and what differentiates them from REALISTS and RELATIVISTS. His notion of "solidarity" is the key to that differentiation. Rorty believes that REALISTS [in the context of THE PROGRAMME, we can call them "modernists"] seek solidarity between the "truth" defined by a given human group and a "real" that exists objectively. Their sense of truth connects with a real truth out there. Rorty rejects that. He is for solidarity of truth within a given human group, period. Its truth is derived from within itself, not from its correspondence with (solidarity with) the real truth out there. (p. 24)
Rorty rejects charges leveled at him and other pragmatists that they are merely "relativists" in the sense that any truth can hold. He rejects this because his "account of the value of cooperative human enquiry has only an ethical base, not an epistemological or metaphysical one." (p. 24) That is, the only "truth" he buys is that which he and his group have worked out from within; it is not relative to any other truth, particularly one that is "out there" in an epistemological or metaphysical "reality." (p. 24, 26).
METANARRATIVES DENIED: Rorty rejects the notion that "rationality consists in the applicationn of criteria" or "scientism." (p. 26) Rationality for Rorty, rather, is "the continual reweaving of a web of beliefs rather than...the application of criteria to cases." (p. 26) "Scientism" in the sense of applying criteria from "out there" is like a teleological metanarrative out of Baudrillard. Rorty's term for it is "TRANSHISTORICAL NATURE," which we take to be synonymous with metanarrative. Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth, and History, Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1981), with whom Rorty takes issue, uses the German Grenzbegriff, a "limit-concept of ideal truth." (p. 27) Rorty, of course, rejects such a concept.
SALVAGING ENLIGHTENMENT VALUES: Rorty acknowledges that he values Englightenment-based habits, such as the search for toleration, free inquiry, and a quest for undistorted communication. (p. 29) He acknowledges that they come to him (us) from the appeal of the Enlightenment project to universal Reason, what Rorty calls a "transhistorical nature." Some people (that is, what Rorty calls "realists") believe that, in order to keep these values alive in our lives, we have to keep our allegiance to that univeral Reason, or transhistorical nature. Rorty disagrees: we can admit our disbelief in such a universal Reason and still continue to value the habits of society derived originally from the Enlightenment project. Our project is to have a conversation about our beliefs within our ethnocentric group; they gain the force of truth not by reference to universal Reason but by the strength of our consensus about them. This is just as defensible a basis for truth as the Enlightenment-Realist call for the criteria of universal Reason. For that call is circular anyway: the idea of universal Reason (transhistorical nature) is ITSELF a product of the culture-bound conversation of the Enlightenment. So we should be satisfied with our limited sense of truth and forget about the appeal to a non-existent universal Reason for certification of our sense of truth. It is okay just to "muddle through." (p. 28)
ETHNOCENTRISM: Rorty unabashedly acknowledges that he values the beliefs of his own ethnocentric group over those of other groups. He identifies that group as "the liberal intellectual of the secular modern West." (p. 29) This group is not interested in "radical conversion" into a "New Being" but rather wants to "justify ourselves to our earlier selves" through "muddling discourse." (p. 29) He admits that this is a "lonely provincialism" not a voice for "something ahistorical." (p. 30) It can change, through continued discourse.
"TRUTH": There is NONE in relativism. But there is some in ETHNOCENTRISM: "We cannot justify our beliefs (in physics, ethics, or any other area) to everybody, but only to those whose beliefs overlap ours to some appropriate extent." (p. 31)
OUR ONLY COMFORT: The pragmatist "wants SOLIDARITY [our emphasis] to be our only comfort and to be seen not to require metaphysical support."
[COMMENTS: (A) Rorty's choice of words calls to mind Question One in the old German
Reformed Heidelberg Catechism (1563) coauthored by Zacharias Ursinus: "What is
your only comfort, in life and in death?" Answer: "That I belong...not to
myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ." The contrasting views starkly
outline the posture of the postmodern with respect to religious "reality."
(B) Rorty's vision of an ethnos muddling through toward a consensus about
truth without reference to metaphysical structures out beyond it accords
comfortably with THE PROGRAMME vision of the primeval group--extended through
time--seeking COMFORT from the stories they tell around the fire. In our
sense, every philosophical construction is a story from which the group is
hoping to derive some comfort in the light of the latest experiences in the
forest (and the denuded landscape that succeeds it). We present this vision in
The Genesis Document. Missing, by the way, from
this vision of THE PROGRAMME is the need found on the flip side of
comfort--that is, the desire for adventure, the need to see what is on the other side of the mountain,
whatever the risk. But that is a theme waiting to be developed in our
deliberations.
(C) POSTMODERN POLITICS: Honi Haber soundly rejects Rorty as a source of a viable postmodern political philosophy. She believes that his ethnocentric allegiance totalizes the liberal Western individualist's values. This separates him from the core postmodern commandments against metanarrative and the private, isolated self.]
POSTMODERNIST REJECTS THE TRADITIONALIST (AND MODERNIST) STRATEGY: Rorty, the solidarity pragmatist, rejects the "traditional Western metaphysico-epistemological way of firming up our habits" (p. 33) simply because it is no longer working, no longer "doing its job." (p. 33)
[COMMENT: To answer the question WHY it no longer is doing its job is a major goal of THE PROGRAMME. We look to the likes of David Harvey and Fredric Jameson for a description of changed conditions of living--particularly in the evolution of technologies and in newly emergent processes of capitalism--which have rendered the Enlightenment's search for objectivity problematic.]
SCIENTISM (FALSE) VS. NATURAL SCIENCE (TRUE): Rorty holds up B. F. Skinner as an example of the extreme voice of scientific objectivity, which led to the fantasy of science as the receptacle of total truth--moral and political as well as physical. (p. 33) Rorty defends the truthfulness of natural science but attacks "the attempt to divinize it," an attempt he attributes to the realists. (p. 34)
[COMMENT: Heinz Pagels eloquently supports Rorty's view of natural science in an elegant essay that differentiates between "first-person science" and "third person science."]
Such a shift defrocks the scientist, who in Rorty's view has no more license to see into a non-human order than the non-scientist.
Rorty tries to escape from the constraints of "science as solidarity" among people as opposed to "science as correspondence with reality as it is in itself." He would have our admittedly ethnocentric science/culture try to "weave" our beliefs and theirs in a quest for "unforced agreement." The subtlety here is that our culture has to have built into it a predisposition to "enlarge the scope of 'us' by regarding other poeple, or cultures, as members of the same community of inquiry as ourselves." (p. 38) [COMMENT: The flirtation here with colonization is evident.]
Rorty's pragmatism does not permit of an apocalyptic history (rejected by Michael Andre Bernstein). He does not see humanity moving toward a point of total truth "out there." (His view is the antithesis of that of Teilard de Chardin. He would have us forget about the idea of an "objective truth out there." His important statement on this is copied here for emphasis:
"Pragmatists would like to replace the desire for objectivity--the desire to be in touch with a reality which is more than some community with which we identify ourselves--with the desire for solidarity with that community." (p. 39)
Rorty claims not to be putting science down. Rather, would praise its institutions because they exemplify for the rest of the culture the idea of "unforced agreement." (He sees this as a value that is espoused in all reasonable inquiry and shared by scientists and others equally. He puts it in place of the claim that science sees an "objective truth" in a way that others cannot.) So, "...the only sense in which science is exemplary is that it is a model of human solidarity." (p. 39)
Rorty's pragmatism rejects these distinctions:
Rorty is concerned to respond to the question, "But how would you answer the Nazis if you don't adhere to higher objective principles?" He says there is no hope of beating totalitarianism in argument because we do not share common premises, and it is pointless to pretend "that a common human nature makes the totalitarians unconsciously hold such premises." (p. 42)
ENLIGHTENMENT LAG: Rorty is insightful when he says that the canonization of natural scientists resulted from "the fact that the rhetoric of the Enlightenment p;raised the emerging natural sciences in a vocabulary which was left over from a less liberal and tolerant era. This rhetoric enshrined all the old philosopohical oppostitions between mind and world, appearance and reality, subject and object, truth and pleasure." (p. 44) Such enshrinement in Rorty's view (following Dewey) was and is misplaced.