Platt, you forgot our deal. I would stop imputing to you an absurd notion
of "absolute truth" if you stopped imputing to Rorty the notion that he
thinks that truth can be replaced by utility. Rorty spent a career
rescinding such a view (it's questionable whether he ever really forwarded
it, even at his early Peircian moments).
Rorty knows, knew, as well as anyone else that truth cannot be defined as
usefulness. He doesn't, didn't, think truth can be defined at all. Much
like other things we here are familiar with.
Matt
p.s. I don't know who Caldwell is, but he's just repeating the same thing
the classical pragmatists were hearing during their time. My bet is
somebody like Russell or (or maybe Lovejoy) advanced that argument all those
years ago.
The best critique I know of Rorty's philosophy was said by Roger Caldwell:
"If, as Rorty proposes, we replace the notion of truth with that of
usefulness, so
that we accept only those propositions which we find in general to the
'useful,'
then the question arises as to whether they are really useful or not. That
is, the
very criteria by which we judge a proposition to be useful involve the same
recourse to a correspondence with reality which the theory denies in
advance.
We are left, inescapably, with the conclusion that the theory is
incoherent."
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