Richard Rorty - Solidarity or Objectivity?

In this paper from 1989, Richard Rorty distinguishes the realist from the pragmatist, and both from the relativist. Rorty argues that the realist wants to base solidarity on objectivity, while the pragmatist wants to base objectivity on solidarity. He also tells us that pragmatism takes away the comforting metaphysical thought that human beings will always end up developing in a direction we would recognise as good.

[chillkroeteYaYa]

Thank you Victor for your nice discussion of the paper. I am writing a PhD thesis about Rorty's concept of redescription and I learn something new every time I watch your videos (loved the series about Contingency irony and solidarity) Much love from Germany

[johnholmes]

My understanding of Rorty is that while different vocabularies serve different human purposes, none of them can be thought of as getting nearer to reality, or the truth, than any other.

[ingasigrunatladottir]

Thanks Victor for all your great videos. really good and informative and thank you for facilitating other readings on analytic philosophy which is also important for us here in Europe (also important for those who practice analytic philosophy to understand our contential philosophy). It is important to open paths between these ideas that have the same roots and the same subject :)
with love and peace from Iceland

[LenandlarSingh]

Thanks Prof. Gijsbers. I enjoyed it and onto my 2nd viewing, with pens out. Very interested in Pragmatism, partly to write my epistemic stance in PhD thesis. I am really sailing mostly. Any recommendation for a really good book on Pragmatism for absolute beginners?

[ALKroonenberg]

Hi Victor!

Always great to procrastinate by watching one of your video's 🙂. While I have a lot of sympathy for the Rorty view and probably even agree with it, I feel like I find it difficult to escape my Realist intuition. Maybe this video helps me pinpoint my unease (probably I should just actually read Rorty, but OK). In Rorty's story, what is the criterion for determining that we need to improve our norms of inquiry? Or, similarly, to evaluate other norms of inquiry and adjust some or all of our own. Here I think the realist story is quite straightforward: the Truth is the arbiter. If our norms of inquiry lead to some incongruity (say, the double slit experiment), we may need to change them. The Objective Truth is telling us our norms of inquiry are insufficient.

How do we explain an incongruity in the Pragmatist view? On one hand it's sort of trivial: our norms of inquiry lead to a contradiction, so they can't be right, or something like that. But there does seem to be some kind of hole there: the incongruity arises because we test our norms *in the world* right? There was not necessarily something *internally* contradictory about classical mechanics, it was because it could not explain Michaelson/Morley that we needed something else. Or maybe a third way to put it: in a Rortian view, what is an experiment measuring?

Again, this is all my ignorance speaking, I don't presume these are unanswered questions!

One final thought: the nice story you talk about at the end is certainly overly self-congratulatory and definitely not self-evidently true as you rightly point out. Yet I don't think it is false to suggest that we have *improved our ability to explain what we see happening in the world around us* which does make a pretty strong prima facie case that we have come closer to understanding The Truth. This strong intuition, aided perhaps by a feeling of self-importance that scientists have of working to uncover How The Universe Really Works Objectively, make Realism quite a hard belief to shake, I think.

[michaelstueben]

Please excuse this overly long text to paraphrase and simplify what professor Gijsbers has just said. Pragmatic insights are not claims of truth, but of provisional meanings, interim understandings, utility, and current justifications. In fact, we best avoid the term “truth” in philosophical and theological writing. “Warranted assertion” was John Dewey’s preferred term. The words “good, ” “objective, ” “purity, ” “sin, ” “moral, ” “piety, ” “holy, ” “sacred, ” “true, ” and “reality” are perfectly fine expressions for everyday conversation, but in philosophical writing they tend to be distractions or underwritten by circular arguments. Instead of using these words, present the evidence of why something is good, objective, pure, sinful (a claimed preference of God unrelated to human morality, unless so defined), holy, true (a correspondence to reality), and reality (that which can be described as true). To say Newton’s three laws of motion are true is really to say they are useful in predicting and controlling nature, this and no more. Is the Big bang theory true? It is the model that currently best fits the data, this and no more. To the claim that sexual activity should be limited to procreation, the pragmatist asks for the sociological and psychological data that would tend to foster agreement. If no data can be presented, then the pragmatist clams that the adjectives of “true, ” and of “being a God directive” are advanced to end unpleasant questioning. The quest for truth or for certainty in religion and philosophy turns out to be a quest for meanings—not truth—all based on different preferred assumptions—e.g., the Bible represents objective moral truth, or the master race should dominate all other races, or eliminating needless suffering is the basis of all morality, etc.

[williammcenaney]

Maybe we should say "conformity" instead of "correspondence" because each proposition corresponds to its denial.