"it is important to remember that some of Rorty’s views are more outrageous than others—but none are less. The more outrageous view is that the structure of authority and responsibility that constitutes objectivity is actually incoherent. When we think from a pragmatist point of view about what it would require, we see that it is not possible for us to institute such a structure. For it requires granting authority to something non-human, something that is merely there, to intrinsically normatively inert things that belong in a box with Wittgenstein’s 'sign-post considered just as a piece of wood.'
A fair amount of Rorty’s rhetoric seems to commit him to a view of this stripe. What is intelligible is a cognitive theoretical consensus on various points (contingent, partial, and temporary though it may be). But the idea of something that cannot enter into a conversation with us, cannot give and ask for reasons, somehow dictating what we ought to say is not one we can in the end make sense of. It is the idea that we are subject (responsible) to an ultimately irrational authority— one whose cognitive contentfulness is, just because of that irrationality, unintelligible. Reality as the modern philosophical tradition has construed it (“just as a piece of wood”) is the wrong kind of thing to exercise rational authority. That is what we do to each other. That is the lesson we ought to have learned about God from the first Enlightenment, and it will take a second Enlightenment to teach us how to apply that lesson to Objective Reality: the successor candidate for our subjection forwarded not now by the Church, but by Science. Robert Brandom, in his, "An Arc of Thought: From Rorty's Eliminative Materialism to His Pragmatism" Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
