Rorty Richard - Consequences of Pragmatism.pdf - Rorty - MKTK

Consequences of pragmatism

Richard Rorty (1982)

Introduction

1. Platonists, Positivists, and Pragmatists

The essays in this book are attempts to draw consequences from

a pragmatist theory about truth. This theory says that truth is not

the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically

interesting theory about. For pragmatists, "truth" is just the

name of a property which all true statements share. It is what is

common to "Bacon did not write Shakespeare," "It rained

yesterday," "E equals mc2" "Love is better than hate," "The

Allegory of Painting was Vermeer's best work," "2 plus 2 is 4," and

"There are nondenumerable infinities." Pragmatists doubt that

there is much to be said about this common feature. They doubt

this for the same reason they doubt that there is much to be said

about the common feature shared by such morally praiseworthy

actions as Susan leaving her husband, America joining the war

against the Nazis, America pulling out of Vietnam, Socrates not

escaping from jail, Roger picking up litter from the trail, and the

suicide of the Jews at Masada. They see certain acts as good

ones to perform, under the circumstances, but doubt that there

is anything general and useful to say about what makes them all

good. The assertion of a given sentence -or the adoption of a

disposition to assert the sentence, the conscious acquisition of a

belief -is a justifiable, praiseworthy act in certain circumstances.

But, a fortiori, it is not likely that there is something general and

useful to be said about what makes All such actions good-about

the common feature of all the sentences which one should

acquire a disposition to assert.

Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the

True or the Good, or to define the word "true" or "good,"

supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be

done in this area. It might, of course, have turned out otherwise.

People have, oddly enough, found something interesting to say

about the essence of Force and the definition of "number." They

might have found something interesting to say about the

essence of Truth. But in fact they haven't. The history of

attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly

coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call

"philosophy"-a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the

Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not

mean that they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to

Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we

should ask those questions any more. When they suggest that we

not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they

do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge

or man which says that "there is no such thing" as Truth or

Goodness. Nor do they have a "relativistic" or "subjectivist"

theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change

the subject. They are in a position analogous to that of

secularists who urge that research concerning the Nature, or the

Will, of God does not get us anywhere. Such secularists are not

saying that God does not exist, exactly; they feel unclear about

what it would mean to affirm His existence, and thus about the

point of denying it. Nor do they have some special, funny,

heretical view about God. They just doubt that the vocabulary of

theology is one we ought to be using. Similarly, pragmatists keep

trying to find ways of making anti-philosophical points in non-

philosophical language. For they face a dilemma if their language

is too unphilosophical, too "literary," they will be accused of

changing the subject; if it is too philosophical it will embody

Platonic assumptions which will make it impossible for the

pragmatist to state the conclusion he wants to reach.

All this is complicated by the fact that "philosophy," like "truth"

and "goodness," is ambiguous. Uncapitalised, "truth" and

"goodness" name properties of sentences, or of actions and

situations. Capitalised, they are the proper names of objects -

goals or standards which can be loved with all one's heart and

soul and mind, objects of ultimate concern. Similarly,

"Philosophy" can mean simply what Sellars calls "an attempt to

see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang

together, in the broadest possible sense of the term." Pericles,

for example, was using this sense of the term when he praised

the Athenians for "philosophising without unmanliness"

(philosophein aneu malakias). In this sense, Blake is as much a

philosopher as Fichte, Henry Adams more of a philosopher than

Frege. No one would be dubious about philosophy, taken in this

sense. But the word can also denote something more specialised,

and very dubious indeed. In this second sense, it can mean

following Plato's and Kant's lead, asking questions about the

nature of certain normative notions (e.g., "truth," "rationality,"

"goodness") in the hope of better obeying such norms. The idea

is to believe more truths or do more good or be more rational by

knowing more about Truth or Goodness or Rationality. I shall

capitalise the term "philosophy" when used in this second sense,

in order to help make the point that Philosophy, Truth, Goodness,

and Rationality are interlocked Platonic notions. Pragmatists are

saying that the best hope for philosophy is not to practise

Philosophy. They think it will not help to say something true to

think about Truth, nor will it help to act well to think about

Goodness, nor will it help to be rational to think about

Rationality.

So far, however, my description of pragmatism has left an

important distinction out of account. Within Philosophy, there

has been a traditional difference of opinion about the Nature of

Truth, a battle between (as Plato put it) the gods and the giants.

On the one hand there have been Philosophers like Plato himself

who were otherworldly, possessed of a larger hope. They urged

that human beings were entitled to self-respect only because

they had one foot beyond space and time. On the other hand-

especially since Galileo showed how spatio-temporal events

could be brought under the sort of elegant mathematical law

which Plato suspected might hold only for another world-there

have been Philosophers (e.g., Hobbes, Marx) who insisted that

space and time make up the only Reality there is, and that Truth

is Correspondence to that Reality. In the nineteenth century, this

opposition crystallised into one between "the transcendental

philosophy" and "the empirical philosophy," between the

"Platonists" and the "positivists." Such terms were, even then,

hopelessly vague, but every intellectual knew roughly where he

stood in relation to the two movements. To be on the

transcendental side was to think that natural science was not

the last word -that there was more Truth to be found. To be on

the empirical side was to think that natural science-facts about

how spatio-temporal things worked-was all the Truth there was.

To side with Hegel or Green was to think that some normative

sentences about rationality and goodness corresponded to

something real, but invisible to natural science. To side with

Comte or Mach was to think that such sentences either

"reduced" to sentences about spatio-temporal events or were

not subjects for serious reflection.

It is important to realise that the empirical philosophers -the

positivists-were still doing Philosophy. The Platonic

presupposition which unites the gods and the giants, Plato with

Democritus, Kant with Mill, Husserl with Russell, is that what the

vulgar call "truth" the assemblage of true statements-should be

thought of as divided into a lower and an upper division, the

division between (in Plato's terms) mere opinion and genuine

knowledge. It is the work of the Philosopher to establish an

invidious distinction between such statements as "It rained

yesterday" and "Men should try to be just in their dealings." For

Plato the former sort of statement was second-rate, mere pistis

or doxa. The latter, if perhaps not yet episteme, was at least a

plausible candidate. For the positivist tradition which runs from

Hobbes to Carnap, the former sentence was a paradigm of what

Truth looked like, but the latter was either a prediction about the

causal effects of certain events or an "expression of emotion."

What the transcendental philosophers saw as the spiritual, the

empirical philosophers saw as the emotional. What the empirical

philosophers saw as the achievements of natural science in

discovering the nature of Reality, the transcendental

philosophers saw as banausic, as true but irrelevant to Truth.

Pragmatism cuts across this transcendental/empirical

distinction by questioning the common presupposition that

there is an invidious distinction to be drawn between kinds of

truths. For the pragmatist, true sentences are not true because

they correspond to reality, and so there is no need to worry what

sort of reality, if any, a given sentence corresponds to -no need

to worry about what "makes" it true. (just as there is no need to

worry, once one has determined what one should do, whether

there is something in Reality which makes that act the Right one

Rorty Richard - Consequences of Pragmatism.pdf

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