Hi DMB,
Steve replied:
I suppose the issue has something to do with the "linguistic turn."
While the classical and neo-classical pragmatists talk about
experience. Rorty focuses on language. I'd be interested in hearing
your take on the linguistic turn and what is lost in taking this turn.
dmb says:
Yes, that's right. David Hildebrand writes (a paper and a book)
about how the linguistic turn led Rorty to a "theoretical starting
point", which is at odds with what he calls the "natural starting
point" in James and Dewey, both of whom were radical empiricists.
And basically that's lost in his theoretical starting point. Rorty
doesn't begin with experience. He begins with language. We hear
this echoed in the way he construes the rejection of the
correspondence theory of truth as a matter of matching "sentences"
with reality. The radical empiricists instead says that valid
concepts or high quality ideas have to agree with experience.
Rorty's starting point basically has him rejecting any kind of
empiricism. If memory serves, he thinks epistemology is just as
dead as metaphysics.
Steve:
I think "agreement with experience" is a general account of truth
that pretty much everybody subscribes to. Where it gets dicey is when
philosophers try to get more specific about what this agreement is
supposed to be like.
Steve said:
Another issue that may separate Rorty from other pragmatists is
that Rorty doesn't equate truth with "warranted assertability"
which is why, as I recall, Davidson never wanted to be called a
pragmatist and why Putnam didn't think Rorty was really a pragmatist.
dmb says:
Yea, Hildebrand's book is very much about the Rorty-Putnam debates
and the phrase "warranted assertability" gets used a lot. It's
telling, I suppose, that all three of those guys come out of the
analytic tradition and when that dream didn't pan out there was a
tendency to find something less ambitious as far as discovering
"reality" and the "truth". I mean, I don't like Putnam or Davidson
any better than Rorty. Somehow that whole tradition just smells
like the kind of amoral rationality that Pirsig sought to
overcome. Putnam, for example, thought that Rorty was a spoiler, a
nihilist and "an explicit cultural relativist". Even if that's only
half way true, it would still be very far away from what Pirsig is
up to.
Steve:
I think anyone such as Putnam making the charge of relativism must be
doing so within a subject-object picture where relative-absolute,
subjective-objective, accidental-essential distinctions make any
sense, so I think you'd then have to look at such people as Putnam
making this charge as not understanding what Rorty is doing. It's not
because the likes of Putnam are just too dumb to get it. It's just
that they are too attached to the subject-object picture to make
sense of Rorty or Pirsig.
Steve said:
When I hear the charge of relativism being made, all it sounds like
is an epithet that a Rigel type uses when he disagrees with someone
else's morality. As I see it, Rigel is going to walk away
unconvinced by both Pirsig's and Rorty's protestations about being
called a relativist, but that doesn't make either one a relativist.
I completely understand that Pirsig and Rorty will be accused of
relativism by someone like Rigel, but I can't understand how you
would be interested in making the charge. Isn't asking if morality
is relative or absolute pretty much the same as asking whether it
is subjective or objective?
dmb says:
I know what you mean. Whenever a person complains about relativism
I find myself waiting for the other shoe to drop. The next step is
very, very often a defense of God's morality or the greatness of
one's own culture. In other words, complaints about relativism are
very often motivated by absolutism or religious fanaticism. And
Rigel himself, as a character, is kind of a dick. But I can also
tell you that the issue of relativism came up in every one of my
philosophy classes. Apparently, college kids these days are mostly
one or the other, either they are relativists or they are religious
as hell. Professors can't stand up in front of the classroom and
dis religion but they certainly have a few choice words about
relativism. I mean, just because a dick says it doesn't necessarily
mean the point is invalid.
Steve:
I find that it's generally hard to tell what people mean by
relativism. If they mean that a relativist doesn't see anything as
better or worse than anything else, then there is no such thing as a
relativist (at least outside of the college kids while in a
philosophy classroom). If they mean that relativists think that the
circumstances surrounding an act have a lot to do with the morality
of an act, then pretty much everyone is a relativist.
DMB:
I think your equation - where relative truths are subjective and
absolute truths are objective - is pretty damn good. That's one of
the reasons I'm so suspicious of Rorty notion of what counts as
truth, namely "intersubjective agreement". I think it's pretty
clear that this is the idea that leads Rorty's critics to conclude
that he's an explicit cultural relativist.
Steve:
I haven't read anything that suggests that Rorty thinks that truth is
determined by consensus. Rorty takes the pragmatic view of beliefs as
habits of action and characterizes a belief that is held to be (as
far as we know) true to be one that such that no other belief is (as
far as we know) a better habit of action.
Dewey's "warranted assertability" is often viewed as pragmatism's
theory of truth and defining truth as "that which works." Critics
have noted that to do so is to conflate truth with justification.
Rorty prefers to keep Plato's formulation of knowledge as justified
true belief and thinks that these three terms (justification, truth,
and belief) need to be kept separate, i.e., we can't say we know
something if it isn't true or if we don't believe it or if we are not
justified in believing it even if it turns out later to be true.
He reads Dewey as not having a theory of truth, as suggesting that we
give up on the project of finding a theory of truth and instead go
ahead and talk about the process of justification, anyway, which is
what is always our concern in practice. That's where "that which
works" comes in for Rorty--not as a theory of truth but as an
explanation of the verification process by which we justify our
beliefs to ourselves and to others. If a belief leads us to what we
want, i.e., if it works, we hold it to be true, at least
provisionally. Pragmatists don't say that's how it ought to be and
define truth as such. They simply note that that's how justification
functions in practice.
Rorty drops any notion of finding an interesting theory of truth on
pragmatic grounds, because a theory of truth isn't going to help us
say more true things or tell the difference between a true and a
false statement. The problem here for theories of truth in general is
that that was the whole purpose of searching for a theory of truth to
begin with.
Even though he lost interest in theories of truth, you still don't
need to be concerned with Rorty's "notion of what counts as truth."
For Rorty, only true statements count as true. "The cat is on the
mat" is a true statement only if the cat is on the mat. Neither Rorty
nor anyone else has come up with a theory that tells us in general
which statements actually are true, so he doesn't expect anyone to
come up with anything much more philosophically interesting than such
tautologies.
Best,
Steve
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