Richard Rorty is a well-known and somewhat controversial contemporary philosopher. As the title of this book shows, he considers himself an heir to the philosophical school of pragmatism (although he would object to the idea that there is a "school" of pragmatism). I read one of Rorty's other books (Philosophy and Social Hope) several years ago. I find his philosophy interesting, and I agree with most of it. The only downside to Rorty is that he often comes across as arrogant and a bit too proud of being provocative.

Consequences of Pragmatism is a collection of essays from roughly the decade of the 1970s. Because the essays were originally published separately, the book repeats themes, ideas, and even sentences. The positive side of the repetition is that it shows what ideas are most important to Rorty and how they apply in a variety of contexts. The essays are arranged in chronological order, and you can see Rorty's writing style becoming clearer and quicker of wit. The final essay, "Philosophy in America Today," has the warmest and most relaxed tone of any in the collection.

In the introductory essay, Rorty frequently says that "the pragmatist" believes this or that when he really means that he believes this or that. Rorty is more extreme than other pragmatists, certainly more than the original pragmatists. Reading this book, I often felt like I was reading political commentary from a person farther to the left than I am. I agree with his general approach, but occassionally he goes too far. For example, he does not believe in a common human nature. I agree that much of our "nature" is conceptually constructed, but I suspect that our common biological heritage constrains the range of purposes we pursue, and thereby constrains which world views we adopt.

• What is Pragmatism?
• The Pragmatic Tradition
• World Well Lost
• Philosophy as a Kind of Writing

What is Pragmatism?

"Pragmatism" is a vague, ambiguous, and overworked word. Nevertheless, it names the chief glory of our country's intellectual tradition. No other American writers have offered so radical a suggestion for making our future different from our past, as have [William] James and [John] Dewey. (p 160)

[Pragmatism] 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=mc squared," "Love is better than hate," "The Allegory of Painting was Vermeer's best work," "2 plus 2 is four," 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. (p xiii)

Pragmatism is ... simply anti-essentialism applied to notions like "truth," "knowledge," "language," "morality," and similar objects of philosophical theorizing. (p 162)

Pragmatism starts from the fact (or warranted belief) that we cannot escape a limited human perspective and see reality as it "truly" is. Reality does not have an intrinsic nature that we can disover, or, if it does, we have no way of knowing that we have discovered it. This view is not unique to pragmatism. What is unique is the conclusion pragmatists draw from it: Given that we cannot choose between rival theories (such as scientific theories) based on their correspondence to some "objective" reality, we should choose based on how well the theories meet our goals. The value of a theory derives from its practical benefits.

When Rorty says that pragmatism is "anti-essentialism" with regard to truth, he is using "essence" in the philosophical sense, where it means a single set of core attributes that define all and only the concept. For some philosophers, for example, the essence of water is its chemical composition. Pragmatists do not believe that the concept of truth has an essence.

"Relativism" is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. ... The philosophers who get called "relativists" are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought. ... The association of pragmatism with relativism is a result of a confusion between the pragmatist's attitude toward philosophical theories with his attitude toward real theories. (p 166-167) [Pragmatists are "metaphilosophical relativists," but do provide a way to decide between rival "real" theories; namely, how well they acheive our purposes.]

On [the pragmatists'] view, the Socratic virtues -- willingness to talk, to listen to other people, to weigh the consequences of our actions upon other people -- are simply moral virtues. They cannot be inculcated or fortified by theoretical research into essence. Irrationalists who tell us to think with our blood cannot be rebutted by better accounts of the nature of thought, or knowledge, or logic. (172)

In this book, Rorty does not provide many arguments supporting the pragmatic theory of truth — or rather the pragmatic view that no such theory is possible or necessary. Instead, he focuses on what the lack of such a theory means to philosophy. If you are looking for an explanation of the philosophy of pragmatism, this book is not the place.

The founders of pragmatism were the American philosophers William James, Charles Pierce, and James Dewey. Rorty is particularly fond of Dewey. Rorty also finds the key features of pragmatic thought in the European philosophers Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Derrida. He sees these thinkers as recognizing the failure of "scientific" philosophy, accepting our inability to achieve certainty, and (mostly) resisting the temptation to offer an alternative worldview to the one they are criticizing.

The Americans and the Europeans make the same points and hold the same positions, but present themselves "in different tones of voice" (p 150). The Americans, Dewey in particular, focus on social hope, whereas the Europeans, especially Nietzsche and Foucault, focus on power.

The realization that we shall never achieve such certainty makes us alternate between despair at there being nothing but power in the world, and intoxication at our own possession of power (p 46).

One can emphasize, as Dewey did, the moral importance of the social sciences — their role in widening and deepening our sense of community and of the possibilities open to this community. Or one can emphasize, as Michel Foucault does, the way in which the social sciences have served as instruments of "the disciplinary society," the connection between knowledge and power rather than between knowledge and human solidarity. (p 203-4)

The first key point is that our concepts influence our perception of the world. We do not passively receive sensory data, then conceptualize it. Our concepts influence what we perceive. One consequence is that we can't trust our senses to put us into unbiased touch with the real world. Rorty quotes Daniel Dennett, from his book Brainstorms:

I recommend giving up incorrigibility with regard to pain altogether, in fact giving up all "essential" features of pain... One of our intuitions about pain is that whether or not one is in pain is a brute fact, not a matter of decision to serve the convenience of the theorist. I recommend against trying to preserve that intuition, but if you disagree, whatever theory I produce, however predictive and elegant, will not be in your lights a theory of pain, but only a theory of what I illicitly choose to call pain. But if, as I have claimed, the intuitions we would have to honor were we to honor them all do not form a consistent set, there could be no true theory of pain... The inability of a robot model to satisfy all our intuitive demands may be due not to any irredeemable mysteriousness about the phenomenon of pain, but to irredeemable incoherence in our ordinary concept of pain.

A second but related point is that our concepts influence our intuitions. Our intuitions, like our sensory data, are not incorrigible links to reality.

What really needs debate between the pragmatist and the intuitive realist is not whether we have intuitions to the effect that "truth is more than assertibility" or "there is more to pains than brain-states" or "there is a clash between modern physics and our sense of moral responsibility." Of course we have such intuitions. How could we escape having them? We have been educated within an intellectual tradition built around such claims... But it begs the question between pragmatist and realist to say that we must find a philosophical view which "captures" such intuitions. The pragmatist is urging that we do our best to stop having such intuitions, that we develop a new intellectual tradition. (p xxix - xxx)

I also think that Dewey was right in thinking that the only intuition we have of the world as determining truth is just the intuition that we must make our new beliefs conform to a vast body of platitudes, unquestioned perceptual reports, and the like. (p 13-14)

It is a mistake to think of somebody's own account of his behavior or culture as epistemically privileged. He might have a good account of what he's doing or he might not. (p 202)

Rorty sees the difference between "given" data and our interpretation of the data as parallel to the analytic/synthetic distinction: between "the relatively difficult to give up and the relatively easy", with "no clear distinction to be drawn between questions of meaning and questions of fact" (p 5).

Suppose we say that there is no poetry among the Patagonians, no astronomy among the aborigines, and no morality among the inhabitants of the planet Mongo. And suppose a native of each locale, protesting against our parochial view, explains that what they have is a different sort of poetry, astronomy, or morals, as the case may be. For the Patagonian, neither Homer nor Shelley nor Mallarme nor Dryden look in the least like poets. He admits, however, that Milton and Swinburne are both faintly reminiscent. ... The aborigine knows nothing of the equinoxes and the solstices, but he does distinguish planets from stars. However, he uses the same term to refer to planets, meteors, comets, and the sun. The stories he tells about the movements of these latter bodies are bound up with a complicated set of stories about divine providence and the cure of disease... Is it a different sort of poetry (or astronomy...), or do they simply have none? is obviously not the sort of question it is very important to answer. (p 10-11)

In short, we do not and cannot have contact with reality independently of a conceptualization of it.

The notion of "the world" as used in a phrase like "different conceptual schemes carve up the world differently" must be the notion of something completely unspecified and unspecifiable — the thing-in-itself, in fact. As soon as we start thinking of "the world" as atoms and the void, or sense data and awareness of them, or "stimuli" of a certain sort brought to bear on organs of a certain sort, we have changed the name of the game. For we are now well within some particular theory about how the world is.... "the world" is either the purely vacuous notion of the ineffable cause of sense and goal of intellect, or else a name for the objects that inquiry at the moment is leaving alone. (p 14 - 15)

If some creature conceptualized the world in a completely different way from us, its behavior based on those concepts would be completely unpredictable to us, and therefore we would not recognize the creature as rational.

If one thinks of meaning in terms of the discovery of the speech dispositions of foreigners [as in Quine's Word and Object -ML] ... then one will not be able to draw a clear distinction between the foreigner's using words different in meaning from any words in our language and the foreigner's having many false beliefs. We can and must play of awkward translations against ascriptions of quaint beliefs, and vice versa, but we will never reach the limiting case of a foreigner all or most of whose beliefs must be viewed as false according to a translating scheme that pairs off all or most of his terms as identical in meaning with some terms of English. We will not reach this case (so the Davidsonian argument goes) because any such translation scheme would merely show that we had not succeeded in finding a translation at all.
But (to extend Davidson's argument a bit) if we can never find a translation, why should we think we are faced with language users at all? ... Suppose that repeated attempts systematically to correlate these sounds with the organisms' environment and behavior fail. What should we say? One suggestion might be that the analytic hypotheses we are using in our tentative translation schemes use concepts that we do not share with the natives -- because the natives "carve up the world" differently, or have different "quality spaces" or something of the sort. But could there be a way of deciding between this suggestion and the possibility that the organisms' sounds are just sounds? Once we imagine different ways of carving up the world, nothing could stop us from attributing 'untranslatable languages' to anything that emits a variety of signals. (p 5-6)

Perhaps we were too hasty in thinking that attributions of personhood and of articulate belief went hand in hand -- for surely we know in advance that butterflies are not persons ... I do not see what 'known in advance not to be a person' could mean when applied to the butterfly save that the butterfly doesn't seem human. But there is no particular reason to think that our remote ancestors or descendants would seem human right off the bat either. Let the notion of a person be as complex and multiply criterioned as you please, still I do not think that it will come unstuck from that of a complex interlocked set of beliefs and desires... (p 10)

The lesson I take from this essay is that the distinction between the "objective world" and our conceptualization of it is parallel to the analytic/synthetic distinction, and is subject to the same issues that Quine identified in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism."

Here is one way to look at physics: there are some invisible things which are parts of everything else and whose behavior determines the way everything else works. Physics is the search for an accurate description of those invisible things...
Here is another way of looking at physics: the physicists are men looking for new interpretations of the Book of Nature. After each pedestrian period of normal science, they dream up a new model, a new picture, a new vocabulary, and then they announce that the true meaning of the Book has been discovered. But of course it never is... What makes them physicists is that their writings are commentaries on the writings of earlier interpreters of Nature... (p 90)

One consequence of pragmatism to which Rorty keeps returning is that science does not have any privileged insight into reality. It is just one vocabulary among others, very successful to its purpose but not essentially different from others.

The concepts of natural science, idealists pointed out, were shown by Kant to be merely instruments which the mind uses to synthesize sense-impressions; science, therefore, can know only a phenonemal world. In textualist terms, this becomes the claim that the vocabulary of science is merely one among others — merely the vocabulary which happens to be handy in predicting and controlling nature. It is not, as physicalism would have us think, Nature's Own Vocabulary. (p 140)

A host of philosophers...have spent the last hundred years trying to use notions like "objectivity," "rigor," and "method" to isolate science from nonscience. They have done this because they thought that the idea that we can explain scientific success in terms of discovering Nature's Own Language must, somehow, be right -- ... even if neither realism nor idealism could explain just what the imagined "correspondence" between nature's language and current scientific jargon could consist in. Very few thinkers have suggested that maybe science doesn't have a secret of success -- that there is no metaphysical or epistemological or transcendental explanation why Galileo's vocabulary has worked so well so far, any more than there is an explanation why the vocabulary of liberal democracy has worked so well so far. (192)

If "scientific method" means merely being rational in some given area of inquiry, then it has a perfectly reasonable 'Kuhnian' sense -- it means obeying the normal conventions of your discipline, not fudging the data too much, not letting your hopes and fears influence your conclusions unless those hopes and fears are shared by all those who are in the same line of work, being open to refutation by experience, not blocking the road of inquiry. In this sense, 'method' and 'rationality' are names for a suitable balance between respect for the opinions of one's fellows and respect for the stubbornness of sensation. (p 194-5)

Rorty imagines a "post-Philosophical culture" where philosophy is recognized as being more like literary criticism than normal natural science. "Attention to interpretation rather than verification — to what the arts and "sciences of man" have in common — was the mark of the literary intellectual." (p 64) Rorty sees this as the appropriate approach to philosophy and believes that Continental philosophy comes closer to this approach than American analytic philosophy.

There is no common standard by which to compare Royce, Dewey, Heidegger, Tarski, Carnap, and Derrida in point of "being a real philosopher." But although philosophy has no essence, it does have a history. (p 62)

All that "philosophy" as a name for a sector of culture means is "talk about Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegle, Frege, Russell... and that lot." Philosophy is best seen as a kind of writing. It is delimited, as is any literary genre, not by form or matter, but by tradition -- a family romance involving, e.g., Father Parmenides, honest old Uncle Kant, and bad brother Derrida. (p 92)

If we get rid of traditional notions of "objectivity" and "scientific method" we shall be able to see the social sciences as continuous with literature -- as interpreting other people to us, and thus enlarging and deepening our sense of community. (p 203)

If one asks for more detail on what this intellectual virtue called "philosophical ability" consists in, the answer would presumably go something like this: the able philosopher should be able to spot flaws in any argument he hears. Further, he should be able to do this on topics outside of those usually discussed in philosophy courses as well as on "specifically philosophical" issues. As a corollary, he should be able to contruct as good an argument as can be constructed for any view, no matter how wrong-headed. The ideal of philosophical ability is to see the entire universe of possible assertions in all their inferential relationships to one another, and thus be able to contruct, or criticize, any argument. ... Perhaps the most appropriate model for the analytic philosopher is now the lawyer, rather than either the scholar or the scientist. (p 219-221)

However, one large barrier to such a culture is that "seeing all criteria as no more than temporary resting-places, constructed by a community to facilitate its inquiries, seems morally humiliating. ... When the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form 'There is something within you which you are betraying...'" (p xlii).

Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert Brandom

I read this collection a few weeks after Richard Rorty died of pancreatic cancer on June 8, 2007. I had this volume on my "to be read" shelf of books at the time of his passing. The book contains essays about Rorty's philosophy by other eminent philosophers, with a response from Rorty to each one. I found the book very stimulating, both for Rorty's ideas and for the give-and-take between the philosophers.

The most fundamental idea in Rorty's thought is that our concepts and scientific theories do not "correspond" to an objective reality whose structure is independent of our concepts and our purposes. In fact, he views a commitment to realism as comparable to belief in God, and believes that abandoning realism would complete the project of the Enlightenment by liberating us from the secular counterpart of authoritarian religion. As you might imagine, this view is controversial.

Is the idea of an external cognitive authority (the idea that we are responsible for the correctness and rational justifiability of our beliefs to an objective reality construed as prior to and independent of our practices) really objectionable in the same ways and for the same reasons that the idea of an external moral authority (the idea that we are responsible for the correctness and rational justifiability of our actions to the commands of a God construed as prior to and independent of our practices) is objectionable? Is it necessary, desirable, or even possible to come to understand our practices of assessing claims to truth and justification...in terms that don't appeal to the notion of an objective world whose authority we are acknowledging? (Brandom, p xii)

More so even that the aptness of the analogy between religion and realism, many philosophers object to the idea that we can adequately explain our understanding of the world without reference to "truth" or some similar notion of answering to the world as it really is. Several of the essays in this book present arguments for why we must refer to objective reality and for particular ways to avoid the problems with simple correspondence theories. (Interestingly, most everyone accepts that correspondence theories are doomed for the reasons given by Quine and Wilfred Sellars.)

A proposition is 'true' if it could be justified under ideal epistemic conditions (Putnam) or could win argumentatively reached agreement in an ideal speech situation (Habermas) or in an ideal communication community (Apel). What is true is what may be accepted as rational under ideal conditions. (Habermas, p 45)

In losing the regulative idea of truth, the practice of justification loses that point of orientation by which standards of justification are distinguished from 'customary' norms ... Without a reference to truth or reason, the standards themselves would no longer have any possibility of self-correction and would thus forfeit the status of norms capable of being justified. (Habermas, p 51; Ramberg makes a similar point)

Suppose that I discover that my spouse is a committed phenomenalist, and really believes that all I am is a logical construction out of her sense-data. Should I feel reassured? ... If her avowals of love and concern are avowals of an attitude to certain logical constructions out of her sense-data, then we have a problem. (Putnam, p 82)

Rorty's view is that there is nothing more to 'truth' than that ability to justify a claim to an audience. Our goal is simply to provide justification to ever-larger audiences, including future audiences who are better versions of ourselves. The most prevalent objections to this view are (a) that a claim could be perfectly well justified and still be wrong, and (b) that it makes truth into a popularity contest.

Some writers seem postively angry at Rorty, as if he doesn't recognize the importance of truth, as if he is saying that we should not or need not refer to "the facts" when justifying a claim. But he is saying that we can not refer to concept-independent facts. I find his arguments convincing, but also empathize with other people's frustration. Surely there is some objective structure to the world that accounts for the regularities we encounter in experience. What is the relationship between that world and our conceptualization of it if it is not a mirror? What makes some scientific theories more successful than others? These questions are at the heart of my fascination with the conversations in this book.

I can agree that "Did X happen?" is not the same question as "Can saying X happened pass muster in the current practice?" But of course, as we pragmatists always say on these occasions, the difference is not one that makes a difference. For anything that helps you decide to answer either question in the affirmative will...let you answer the other question the same way. Pointing out that two questions differ in meaning is not, in itself enough to show a difference between two norms. (p 125)

This excerpt from Rorty's response to McDowell sounds to me like an argument for the view that "passing muster" is the best we can do given our necessarily limited perspective, but that there may be a fact of the matter about whether X actually happened. In other places, however, Rorty clearly states his belief that there is no "objective" fact of the matter.

In my opinion, John McDowell and Robert Brandom provide the most intriguing avenues for exploring the central questions. McDowell is one of several contributors who point out that the "myth of realism ... is in some ways constitutive of the scientific project itself" (Bouveresse, p 139). Rorty would say "so much the worse for the scientific project." But do I read William James wrong when I think he says that 'God' exists because the idea of him makes a difference to people's practice? If that argument is correct, then objective truth exists in the same way.

Brandom's essay includes an interesting thought experiment about how knowledge might derive from mute real-world regularities. It's an idea that deserves close thought.

Someone who is being trained to distinguish Toltec from Mayan potsherds by eye may in fact acquire [reliability]... She may at that point be inclined to call something Toltec, without being able to give any reason for that inclination. If she is in fact sufficiently reliable in distinguishing Toltec from Mayan bits, reliabilist epistemologists argue that when she is right, she genuinely knows she is looking at a Toltec bit, even though she cannot justify that claim... (Brandom, 166)

The woman herself may not say she "knows" which potsherds are Toltec, but someone else can "know" it based on her reliability.

Another common thread through the book is the relationship between metaphysics and politics. "The question of whether there are any beliefs or desires common to all human beings is of little interest apart from the vision of a utopian, inclusivist, human community" (p. 1). Habermas and others believe they can prove that liberal democracy is more rational than other forms of government. Rorty disagrees, because there are no universals standards for justification. We use the same forms of persuasion and argumentation to indoctrinate our college students as Nazi Germany did. We just do it for a better cause.

This book included multiple references to three other pieces I would like to read:

• John McDowell, Mind and World
• Wilfred Sellars, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind"
• Donald Davidson, "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs"

Rorty quotes the Davidson essay in a couple of places, in the context of a suggestion that we don't need a theory of meaning. WHAAA??!! "What interpreter and speaker share, to the extent that communication succeeds, is not learned and so is not a language governed by rules or conventions known to the speaker and interpreter in advance...[they have merely] the ability to converge on passing theories from utterance to utterance" (p 75). It is a disorienting suggestion that I really must pursue!

Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher, by Neil Gross

This book serves a dual purpose. It is an intellectual biography of Richard Rorty, describing how his thinking developed over time. It is also a case study in the "sociology of ideas," showing how social processes influenced the direction of Rorty's development. The author argues that a person's intellectual self-concept is a critical factor in explaining his or her choices.

I really liked this book. I was engrossed in both strands of the story, with Rorty's ideas and the academic context that influenced them. I kept thinking about how contingent facts determine which ideas and philosophers become influential — and about how they just as surely determined my own world view.

Gross has a talent for concisely summarizing philosophical ideas. He only rarely descends into deadly academic prose style. The descriptions of academic decision-making were spot on. I was a perfect reader for the book, being familiar with Rorty and analytic philosophy and having a tolerance for academic approaches.