Rorty and the Uplands

RORTY AND UPLANDS

The nub of Williams’ objection to Rorty is that W believes that R’s attempt to, as he writes, “detach the spirit of liberal critique from the concept of truth” = “a fundamental mistake.”

And W’s worry is the people like R deny that the virtue of sincerity/truthfulness has intrinsic value.

W also believes that we can have intrinsic values w/o having Plato, that we can argue that being truthful or being dedicated to truth is good just because it is good and not for some instrumental value.

W thinks that w/o a general commitment to sincerity and accuracy there will be no society, no political community, possible.

Two conditions for intrinsic value:

A.     That something be all but necessary for ‘basic human purposes’.

B.     That it can be coherently treated as an intrinsic good.

R’s riposte is that these virtues are important and can be explained much more easily instrumentally – how could we have a society w/o sincerity and accuracy?

R thinks that W wants, whether he knows it fully or not, to preserve some of the older dualisms, such as

REALLY REAL VS. MERELY HUMAN

IN-ITSELF VS. THE FOR-US

He also wants to preserve the analytic philosopher’s distinction between

QUEST FOR TRUTH

QUEST FOR JUSTIFICATION

This makes the assumption that inquiry can have TWO distinct aims:

ON ONE HAND TO GET OTHER PEOPLE TO AGREE TO YOUR CLAIMS – JUSTIFICATION

ON THE OTHER, TO ACQUIRE TRUE BELIEFS, WHETHER THEY CAN BE JUSTIFIED TO YOUR FELLOWS OR NOT.

In both of these R thinks W is reverting to the old Platonic belief that in seeking to back up claims we are responsible to two constituencies –

FELLOW HUMANS

SOMETHING NON-HUMAN (REASON, GOD, REALITY, WHATEVER)

Prags think that these two allegedly different paths to certainty are indistinguishable, that is that we do exactly the same things to get truth in both alleged lines of investigation. There is only one line of investigation.

W asks whether we prags can tell the difference between methods for acquiring T and methods for producing consensus. Is brainwashing and waterboarding the same as getting to the truth? Both Are modes of justification.

Prag answer:

“the procedures we use for justifying beliefs to one another are among the things that we try to justify to one another.”

Example we once believed that referring to the Pope’s encyclicals was a great way to settle moral questions, or that consulting Genesis was a good way of learning about the origins of mankind – and some people still believe both or one of those things – but today in public we have abandoned these ways.

But asks the pragger how do we know that the ways we got argued out of Pope belief and Genesis belief were not themselves forms of brainwashing r social pressuring, especially since advocates of both positions make exactly this sort of argument?

We cannot tell – here “our spade is turned” because says R there is “no way to compare our representations as a whole with the way things are in themselves.”

Let’s be mighty careful about this, because it can mean two entirely different things.

On one hand it can mean what Kant thought it should mean, namely that although there is a way things really are, a way things are in themselves, we cannot know this way directly but only as through a glass darkly via the distorting lenses of representation.

The other way and the one harder to learn is that the idea that there is a way things really are makes no sense. When we posit this idea we are already secretly and illegitimately thinking that there is something out there called Reason that has a take on the world whether anyone is being reasonable or not, or we are assuming that there must be some Being with reason who knows the way the world really is without the filter of the senses and that since we too have Reason we can at least imagine, in a purely conceptual sense, what that world must be like. But if we believe that reasoning is a set of ape strategies developed by chance, trial and error, to cope with a changing set of environments, both natural and cultural, then the idea of this ape approaching the world in some non-thematized, non-ape way is unintelligible. Not wrong, not mistaken factually, but incoherent, something we literally cannot think without already surreptitiously importing ourselves into the scene and thereby making “Things as They Really Are” = things as they are to the kind of ape we are. This we accept happily and which we know is entirely a function of the agreements the apes make among themselves, ever-changing, about how they should figure their world.

We apes are forever making new things and seeing old things in new and unpredictable ways. When I was you, in 1962 or 1963, computers were huge boxes filled with vacuum tubes into which one fed stacks of punched paper cards. No internet. No WWW. No cell phone or smart phone. One phone in the house, attached to the wall, and the phone itself belonged to the phone company.

We thought the future would mean one piece jump suits and space travel and car-planes and everything faster. No gay or lesbian rights, civil rights movement just getting up steam (“I Have A Dream”, August 1963). Iron Curtain, Cuban missile crisis and USSR as the enemy.

No terrorists or Islamic fundamentalists on the radar.

India and China poor and overpopulated and would always be so.

What was the way the world really was, and from what other vantage point could it be viewed?

This does not and can never mean that there is no such thing as the world and the way it is or that there is no truth. Claiming that is insane, not worth listening to save for entertainment. But does this mean that there is some way the world really is? Yes – the way we conceive, the ways we conceive it, today.