Truth and Progress: Volume 3 : Philosophical Papers (Philosophical Papers (Cambridge))

Rating:
Summary: A Fashionable Madness?
Review: If truth is objective, then the truth has nothing to fear. The truth will remain the truth, regardless of what anyone says.

The real danger would be if the truth were objective, and we believed that there was no such thing. The real danger would be for us. For if there were an Objective Reality, and we lost contact with it or never had it to begin with, then we would be insane, or possibly dead.

That's the real question for me: when is a person insane? Is a person insane when his/her linguistic community decides that s/he is nuts? Or is there something called Reality that a person falls out of contact with? It's all theory until you go mad, as I have been. Have I Regained Contact With Reality or have I simply become more popular? My deep suspicion is that there is a mind-independent reality, we can be in contact with it, and know we're in contact with it, and if we aren't then Phone Calls May Have to be Made.

In saying that there is an objective reality, we mean only that there is something outside of the aesthetic field of consciousness and its object. Something that might eat you. Rorty would probably not deny this. Instead he denies arcane philosophical claims about the nature of truth and reality. But it is precisely this common-sense notion of an objective world that clumsy realist philosophical notions are intended to preserve.

Is there some Truth and Reality to be found in the cyberspace fun-show, or is there merely ever-proliferating constantly mutating fashionable madness? Might it not be that the only pragmatic thing for a biological organism is to be in contact with objective reality at all times, however exactly that is accomplished? Assuming of course that human-eating dinosaurs are objectively real, and not a social construction? Rorty talks about the "straw-man claim that there were no dinosaurs before we 'invented' them" (57), but on page 8 he claims that quarks are a "recent social construction." Few thinkers so eagerly invite straw-man attacks.

"Truth and Progress" is a thought-provoking work. Its pragmatic value, however, is questionable. It might be better to spend your money on weapons or nutritional products. In any case, Richard Rorty strikes again.

Rating:
Summary: Trying to be a philosophy of the future
Review: It is actually quite difficult to teach me anything, and this book will appeal mainly to those who seek examples of how often modern philosophy tries to avoid using the wrong word for anything that I might consider significant. Often in this book, Richard Rorty is able to comment on reactions that other philosophers had to things that he had previously written. On the topic of truth, each philosopher must be attempting to state things that the others had assumed but wouldn't say themselves, and I suspect this mainly because page 1 already has something to say about advanced thinkers, "like believers in universal human rights, know what is really going on." It is quite a future we have been having since this book came out in 1998, with games involving secret particles causing America to complain that thousands of specially designed high-strength aluminum tubes present a danger to civilization in recent months. These tubes might be a sign of "Iraqi interest in acquiring nuclear arms." [Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller in NEW YORK TIMES, 09/08/2002 or so].

In the chapter of this book, "The End of Leninism," Rorty attempts to see the need our future, which somehow is here already, has for some rhetoric. "But unless some new metanarrative eventually replaces the Marxist one, we shall have to characterize the source of human misery in such untheoretical and banal ways as `greed,' `selfishness,' and `hatred.'" (p. 235). I'm amazed at how quickly the economic thinking of our time adopted the assumption that sustainable human life would be part of a system in which each life might be required to be economically responsible for paying whatever cost would be associated with providing whatever power and water might be necessary to sustain its existence. Even aluminum tubes might play some part in economic self-sufficiency, but people who do their thinking for the governments on this planet seem unlikely to think so.

"The End of Leninism" is the chapter of this book in which Rorty discusses a comic frame suggested by Kenneth Burke in the book ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORY in 1936. Rorty, in assuming intentional acts by those "butchers who have presided over the slaughter-benches of history ~ people like Hadrian and Attila, Napoleon and Stalin, Hitler and Mao" (p. 241) fails to demonstrate how the politics of Chairman Mao is particularly apt for such a vivid appreciation of how we now make much ado over deaths which political subordinates chose not to make a big deal of, but which are now seen as highly political. Even Stalin and Hitler might be ironically considered worse now than when they actually had the power to do what they are now merely condemned for. Rorty seems puzzled by Burke's simple statement, "Comedy requires the maximum of forensic complexity." (p. 241, ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORY, p. 42). If people couldn't complain about these things now, down to the smallest detail, they would not seem so funny. What Burke means by complexity might be illustrated best by his statement, "The best of Bentham, Marx, and Veblen is high comedy." (p. 241, ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORY, p. 42). Rorty is concerned about seeing these people "as people who help us understand how we tricked ourselves in the past rather than as people who tell us the right thing to do in the future." (p. 242). This would be great if someone figured out how to do the future of September 11, 2001 without any "apocalyptical talk of `crisis' and `endings,' less inclined toward eschatology." (p. 242). Rorty's ending is close to Burke's view of literary criticism: "criticism had best be comic." (p. 243, ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORY, p. 107).

Rating:
Summary: Blind leading blind
Review: Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins has his faithful flock. One of them is pragmatist Richard Rorty. Rorty takes seriously the idea that we live in a pointless and meaningless world, where there is no good and evil. In his Truth and Progress, Rorty always building on the authority of Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett keeps saying that the only criteria to test a given proposition is its usefulness, not its truth. We never exactly understand the standards by which he measures usefulness, or from whose point of view. Just imagine Adolf Hitler reasoning: "is the proposition that we need to respect the human dignity of the Jews useful?". Rorty himself endeavors to test the "truth" of his own pragmatist propositions by dealing with the Holocaust. His "insightful" conclusion: since there is no good and evil in a meaningless universe, we cannot say that the Holocaust is inherently evil, we just can say that the triumphant liberal ideas made it look evil. If Hitler had won the war, Rorty would certainly be saying that human rights are evil. This is certainly the "universal acid" Daniel Dennett keeps talking about. It is "Darwin's dangerous idea" in action. It is also very stupid an nonsense. Do we need a better example of blind leading blind?

Rating:
Summary: More Great Essays
Review: Rorty's Introduction is excellent, but short. The chapters are organized into three sections. The first eight articles deal with some fairly technical philosophical disputes, though often beginning and ending with more general comments. The next four address respectively human rights, cultural diversity, feminism, and the end of Leninism. These provide the most new material for a reader familiar with Rorty's other books. The last five are a rather strange mix, providing some interesting thoughts on history and on Derrida, while carrying Rorty's dubious dichotomy of "private" and "public" (developed in previous works) to what seem to this reader ever absurder and more tangled conclusions.

Readers familiar with Rorty's work will find more wonderful examples of it in this volume. New ideas can be found throughout, and some old ideas are here better developed. Some bad old ideas (such as some found in the final chapter of "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity," criticized by Norman Geras in "Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind; The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty,") seem to have been dropped or developed into good ideas. And Rorty is unlikely to create many new opponents with this book, though he'll probably keep many of his old ones.

But old-hands at learning from Rorty may find the first section of this book a somewhat tiresome, if admirable and patient, reply to the same moral weakness in eight slightly different varieties. And newcomers may not find this book a good introduction to Rorty's thinking. For that purpose I am always inclined to recommend "Consequences of Pragmatism," even though Rorty has changed his mind on many points in it - or perhaps partly for that very reason: it is easier to begin with the earlier Rorty and follow his progress chronologically.

I don't think that Rorty has yet written for a really popular audience, except perhaps in his new political book "Achieving Our Country," and in some magazine articles too short to make important points in. I do think Rorty is far easier for many readers to understand than are Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and various postmodernist writers, and easier also than Wittgenstein, Davidson or even Dewey. And I do not see that anything is sacrificed to achieve this clarity. I imagine I have spent more pleasurable time with books by Rorty than with those by any other author with the exception of Nietzsche. I might recommend this book as an introduction, not to Rorty, but to Davidson, who is frequently discussed in it.

Rorty sees his job largely as cleaning up the rough but radical work of more creative thinkers than he, cleaning up and popularizing. Rorty thinks that he belongs to (in Kuhnian terms) normal, as opposed to radical, philosophy, that he carries out projects devised by the REAL geniuses, and otherwise marks time until the next genius (namely Derrida) begins to be understood. I am not so sure.

Although I accept (at least as a rough outline) Kuhn's notion of paradigm shifts - the idea that a field progresses by asking new questions as well as by answering old ones - and although I agree with the emphasis Rorty places on the need for radical imaginative creation, I do not think that the lines are always crisp between radical and normal contributors (or even specific contributions) to a field. I am inclined to be a little suspicious of the surety with which Rorty thinks he can state whether something (a statement, much less a book) is an answer to an old question or the creation of a new one. This dichotomy is disturbingly similar to that of scheme-content so often convincingly dismissed by Davidson and Rorty. If statements cannot have forms and contents, then why should we be so sure it's a good idea to think of "questions" as forms awaiting the provision of their contents by "normal" workers until a new form is created? Having learned from Rorty to reduce such dichotomies to a matter of degree of utility, I interpret his claim that he is only an underlaborer as no more than a quite honest, admirable, and probably very productive humility, with perhaps a pinch of anxiety-of-influence thrown in.

One theme brought out more prominently in this collection than in some previous ones is Rorty's desire to change the usage of certain words (such as "objective," and the two words in the book's title) rather than discarding them altogether. If you are wondering why he should wish to do either, it may help to quote the first paragraph of his Introduction:

"'There is no truth.' What could that mean? Why should anybody say it?

"Actually, almost nobody (except Wallace Stevens) does say it. But philosophers like me are often said to say it. One can see why. For we have learned (from Nietzsche and James, among others) to be suspicious of the appearance-reality distinction. We think that there are many ways to talk about what is going on, and that none of them gets closer to the way things are in themselves than any other. We have no idea what 'in itself' is supposed to mean in the phrase 'reality as it is in itself.' So we suggest that the appearance-reality distinction be dropped in favor of more useful ways of talking. But since most people think that truth is correspondence to the way reality 'really is,' they think of us as denying the existence of truth."

Another feature that stands out in this new collection is Rorty's terrific ability to pick out arguments by analogy to events long-passed. Often, rather than baldly claiming that rejecting a particular philosophical argument is a rejection of theology (as well as that said rejection is possible without disastrous consequences), Rorty points out the similarities between this rejection and one long-accepted.