The passing of Richard Rorty

[hfojvt]

Just came to my attention as I finally read Eric Alterman's latest column in 'The Nation'.

"Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 in New York City – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher."

Thought it should be mentioned, and discussed here, if he was somewhat of a liberal icon.

However, although the name was familiar to me, detailed knowledge about him or his philosophy was not, so I did a little reading.

http://stanford.edu/~rrorty/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rorty

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/#3

Although I have respect for Dewey, as I studied him in various Institutional Economics classes, I do not like what I read here about Rorty's pragmatism.

"Pragmatists generally hold that a proposition is true if believing it helps us solve a given problem."

It may depend on how 'problem' and 'solve' are defined, but I am struck by the similarity of that pragmatism and the philosophy of the Bush administration which acts as though it can 'make' its own truth, regardless of any facts. They hold that a proposition is true, if believing it helps them consolidate or expand their political power or enrich the wealthy.

I would say, for example, that the truth of the revenue effects of tax cuts are true independent of any pragmatic uses. Believing that tax cuts will increase revenue may help sell the idea to ignorant, greedy and hopeful masses, but in the end, the truth is, they don't and they haven't.

Maybe it's a motivational thing, at some level, the belief that civilization is worth preserving will motivate people to roll up their sleeves and work to preserve it. But I have no idea what Rorty has said about these things, since I cannot remember reading any of his works. How about y'all?

[Jim__]

1. To get an idea of Rorty's political philosophy, you could try his book,

"Achieving Our Country".

As to the sentence, Pragmatists generally hold that a proposition is true if believing it helps us solve a given problem., I don't believe that's Rorty's; and that was never my understanding of what he was saying (although, I'll freely admit that my understanding of Rorty is limited). I do remember Rorty expressing his understanding of truth and the difficulty (impossibility?) of reaching it by asking if you came back to earth in 10,000 years, maybe 100,000 years, which of the things that you believed would still be accepted as true. Probably some of your beliefs would still be accepted, but you could never be sure which ones. Given the difficulty in reaching the truth, the best we could do was to try to verify our beliefs by discussing them in a free and open way with other people and having our beliefs verified by others' acceptance of them.

[hfojvt]

2. True, that was a quote from Wiki and not from Rorty

and continuing in that link, they mention this:
"Part of what James and Schiller mean by the phrase 'making truth' is their idea that we make things true by verifying them. This sense of 'making truth' has not been adopted by many other pragmatists."

Going back to my example about taxes, although the Supply Side Laffer curve has generally been debunked, the precise nature of the relationship between tax rates, tax revenues, economic growth and other measures of economic and social well being is not fully known. So 'truth' there, although it needs to be fact based, is still provisional and fuzzy.

[Jim__]

3. The key to Rorty's idea about verifying your beliefs is free and open discussion.

Free and open discussion is anathema to the bush admin. Now, there may be people who hold those ideas about taxes and economic growth, etc; but if these beliefs are incorrect (I believe that they are) continued free and open discussion, especially as the amount of empirical data increasess, will eventually reveal the incorrectness of these beliefs. My understanding of Rorty is that that's about a good as we can do.

[hfojvt]

4. free and open discussion is kinda problematic unless it is written

verbal discussion can depend on how audacious, confident, and glib one participant is, even written discussion can depend on that. Statements can be made that seem correct, until you analyze them or do research on their content. You also need access to unbiased and undoctored statistics or other evidence, and the ability to interpret them. But the other problem of free and open discussion is when the public discourse, outside of the internet and university classrooms is dominated by the POV of the rich and powerful who own the means of communication and the talking and writing heads.

[Supersedeas]

5. he gave us much to think about

[Odin2005]

6. Pragmatist philosophy doesn't really appeal to me.

IMO Pragmatic and Positivistic theories of knowledge tend to degenerate into anti-realist forms of Empiricism (the version of Empiricism that takes the position that there is no reality outside of our perceptions) and Instrumentalism (an anti-realist philosophy of science based on the notion that theories are nothing but tools to help solve problems, they don't realy describe anything).

I prefer Karl Popper's Falsificationist Rationalism.

[hfojvt]

7. it seemed to me that most instrumentalists I knew

were also positivists. I presented a paper critical of instrumentalist philosophy at a Western Social Sciences conference. It was not well received or published though. I am pretty sure the paper that won the student contest was a suck-up paper, but that may be sour grapes talking :o I was peer reviewed and found wanting.