Objectivisme relativisme & verite v1

Philosophical Papers

by Richard Rorty

This book is about antirepresentationalism, ethnocentrism, and liberalism. This is the first volume of a collection of papers written between 1980 and 1989. The papers in this volume take up, for the most part, issues and figures within analytic philosophy. Those in the second volume deal mostly with issues arising out of the work of Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Essays, Politics

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 1990

About the author

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The centerpiece of Rorty's critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty's principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. Characterizations and illustrations of a post-epistemological intellectual culture, present in both PMN (part III) and CP (xxxvii-xliv), are more richly developed in later works, such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, hereafter CIS), in the popular essays and articles collected in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), and in the four volumes of philosophical papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991, hereafter ORT); Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991, hereafter EHO); Truth and Progress (1998, hereafter TP); and Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007, hereafter PCP). In these writings, ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time.

Reviews

[Andrew]

The older I get, and the further I get from having read Contingency, Irony, Solidarity at 22 or so (a book that pretty legit changed my life), the less enchanted I find myself with Rorty. At times he presents a position I more or less agree with, and at other times I find myself profoundly frustrated by his analysis. At times he offers a lucid attack against representationalism and the search for a transcendent metaphysics, and at other times he seems to be committing to the worst sort of postmodern refusal to take up any program, which in the real world -- that same real world that us pragmatists are supposed to be using as a metric -- inevitably leads to a lily-livered politics that gets crushed by neoliberalism.

Is it time for Rorty and I to part ways? Perhaps. I know I dreaded picking up these densely packed essays of ideas that often didn't seem worth fighting.

[Michael J.J. Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wrote a long, detailed review of this book, then I realized it was just begging the question. :P

[Harry Vincent · Rating 4 out of 5]

7.5/10

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes Rorty really annoys the shit out of me. I had the urge to give it two stars but I think further away from being annoyed by his really soft-if-not-questionable politics at the end of the book the more I'd like it.

I don't really dig pragmatism either. I felt like Rorty's defense of his inherited project just spins in circles to justify itself.

But I think overall the reason Rorty aggravates me so is because by and large I like to agree with him.

So this review was more about me than the book, but hey...

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not really sure what I'm going to say about this book except that it led me to fear that artificial intelligence will replace secular religion with an overreaching authoritarian utilitarianism.  After I investigated this concern of mine through a Google search while using the Gemini A.I. companion, it appears that the idea that AI's impact on religion could lead to the introduction of an authoritarian utilitarianism is a complex and speculative area of discussion.

Apparently, other people are concerned with this possibility, too and while it's not a certainty, the arguments for the possibility of AI's potential for centralized control are as follows: as AI systems become more powerful and integrated into various aspects of society, there's a risk they could be used to implement highly efficient and centralized control mechanisms, potentially within religious contexts as well.  Utilitarianism, which prioritizes maximizing overall well-being and minimizing harm, could be seen as an appealing framework for AI systems aimed at societal improvement.  If implemented under an authoritarian regime or through highly centralized AI systems, this could lead to the suppression of individual liberties or dissenting views in favor of what is deemed the "greater good" by the AI or those controlling it.

Furthermore, advanced AI could be used to spread specific religious or ethical messages, potentially manipulating beliefs and behaviors on a large scale, which could lead to a homogeneous and impersonal message lacking human connection.  Additionally, A.I. could represent challenges to religious freedom, in that some experts warn that AI could be used to attack religious freedom. If the AI's "greater good" conflicts with individual religious beliefs, there's a risk of suppression or erosion of religious freedom.  The use of AI in religious contexts could involve collecting and analyzing vast amounts of personal data, raising concerns about privacy and the potential for misuse or manipulation.

The counterargument is that AI, as a tool for ethical discourse, has the potential for significantly driving a new flourishing of religion and religious ethics in that artificial intelligence could be used as a tool that can promote justice, equality, compassion, and responsibility.  Currently, religious communities are actively engaging in the ethical development and integration of AI, advocating for systems that align with human values.

In terms of the human element in religious experience, many believe that AI cannot replicate the depth of personal relationships with God or the human elements of empathy and compassion that are essential to religious practice.  Religious traditions emphasize individual transformation and understanding, and AI could be seen as a tool to enhance personal spiritual practices, rather than replacing them with a standardized, utilitarian approach.

The adoption and integration of AI within religious communities may be diverse and decentralized, preventing the emergence of a single, authoritative AI-driven religious system, according to the Universal Life Church.

In conclusion, while the possibility of AI contributing to authoritarian utilitarianism in religion exists, it's not a predetermined outcome. The trajectory of AI's relationship with religion is likely to be shaped by ongoing discussions, ethical frameworks, regulatory developments, and the conscious choices made by both religious communities and AI developers.

Three stars for Rorty's book, which led me to enter this apparently active discussion positioning my review in what proved to be a locus of greater concern.

[Michael A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only read the introduction, "Solidarity or Objectivity?", "Science as Solidarity", "Representation, social practice, and truth" and the entirety of part III which deals with politics.

I like Rorty's writing style and in these essays he comes off a lot less snarky to me than in Consequences of Pragmatism (maybe I'm just used to it) and he offers pretty good critiques and level-headed analyses. He has a tendency to deify John Dewey, but if what Rorty says is true about him, no doubt I should learn more about him (Rorty is also getting me interested in Sellars and Davidson).

His antirepresentationalist pragmatist view I take to be pretty solid. His idea of solidarity and ethnocentrism not necessarily being exclusive to one culture ("us" is the community that solidarity is based on, and "us" seems to be all humans - but Rorty is averse to terms like "humanity" I think) are interesting and might lead to interesting political views.

Unfortunately, he uses a rather unique "de-epistemologized" notion of truth, rationality, etc. to justify the (admittedly contingent) status quo. He thinks reformist liberal democracy has overall been a success, but Enlightenment thinking and concepts must be jettisoned. This is a unique, but still unsatisfying position. He implicitly shows scorn towards Marxism or people to the left of him. The last essay, a response to Lyotard, is pathetic and the first time I can say I think I saw a professional philosopher make a terrible response.

The quote from the essay "Cosmopolitanism without Emancipation":

"We Western liberals have had the Gatling gun, and the native has not. So typically we *have* used force rather than persuasion to convince natives of our own goodness. It is useful to be reminded, as Lyotard reminds us, of our customary imperialist hypocrisy [Good stuff]. But [uh oh] it is also the case that we Western liberals have raised up generations of historians of colonialism, anthropologists, sociologists, specialists in the economics of development, and so on, who have explained to us in detail just how violent and hypocritical we have been."

It seems to me our customary imperialist hypocrisy is balanced out by the fact that conscientious leftists living in reformist liberal democracy have pointed out the customary imperialist hypocrisy.

To be fair, he is not some uncritical cheerleader. He is aware of certain issues with positions he takes, and is modest when he needs to be. Perhaps I misunderstood that passage, but I interpreted it very negatively - I think his whole point was that reformist bourgeois democracy can change from the inside, but we don't even need to be optimistic about this.

I do think his critique of the French/Anglo divide on language was very good in this essay.

Rorty I think, love him or hate him, a pretty good bridge for analytics to explore Continental and vice versa, regardless of what one thinks of his interpretations or ideas, and usually an entertaining read - especially when he says something bizarre or slightly enraging.

[Omar Agha · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of essays tries to do two things at once: First, it is a very well-written, conversational, engaging critique of rationalist realism in Western philosophy. Second, it provides a defense of political liberalism as it exists today (or at least, as it existed in the rich North Atlantic democracies of the late 80's). Rorty convincingly shows that political liberalism can stand on its own without any metaphysical commitments to human rationality or universal moral principles.

But he assumes that once we accept the first argument, we must follow him into accepting the pragmatist defense of liberalism.

For Rorty, all philosophy is "ethnocentric" in the sense that we can never consider ideas that are alien to our culture as "real options." We can pretend to consider such positions, or experiment with them, by voicing or citing them, but we cannot weave them into our web of beliefs without throwing out the whole web. Thus, certain "tensions" and "contradictions" can be accommodated in our belief-web, as long as they are acquired over time and continuously re-analyzed using the tools available to us in each period.

Axiomatic philosophy appears as a post-hoc attempt to "commensurate by hindsight" all the thought of our favorite ancestors into an internally consistent system. But such a system is not actually the foundation for the tradition itself, only a contingent and partial description. Thus, philosophical theories should not be judged by how well they fit with a mind-independent reality (that our favorite ancestors were "getting at" or "approaching") but by the institutions and practices they produce. So far, so good.

But the argument falls apart when it turns from an analysis of the relationship between political liberalism and liberal philosophy to a justification of political liberalism in its current form. If political philosophy is only as good as the institutions and practices it produces, then why does Rorty shy away from a balanced analysis of the institutions and practices of his society? Rorty holds up the virtues of liberal societies --- open-mindedness, fallibilism, tolerance --- as justifications for the Enlightenment tradition that can outlive their metaphysical foundations. But he fails to consider its less virtuous characteristics as a basis for contesting the future value of our intellectual tradition --- environmental destruction, apartheid, and the capture of social and technological advances for the benefit of a rich minority who hold absolute political power over the many.

In my opinion, Rorty's reasoning is effective against the argument that capitalism is bound to collapse due to its internal contradictions. Powerful institutions with a strong material base will not collapse just because they come into conflict with their axiomatic foundations. He is also right that the collapse of liberalism would not, in itself, "prove" that liberalism was always doomed to fail. This particular doctrine about the "contradictions of capitalism" should be questioned. I also appreciate his opposition to the anti-utopianism of certain postmodern leftist philosophers.

Rorty gives us nothing more than a clear account of the ability of late capitalist society to jettison its Enlightenment metaphysics and survive more-or-less unscathed.

[Pavlogreen]

Rorty no decepciona y esta recopilación de ensayos escritos durante los años 80 ofrece algunas claves importantes para entender su pensamiento tanto epistemológico como político. Demuestra su amplio conocimiento de la tradición analítica y su mirada crítica y superadora sobre la misma y ofrece alternativas integradoras que pasan por una renovación del ideario pragmatista. En asuntos políticos Rorty se destapa como un liberal socialdemócrata y cosmopolita y confronta con la izquierda anticapitalista al igual que con el conservadurismo. Independientemente de lo que se piense de sus diferentes posicionamientos (a mí me interesan más los teóricos que los prácticos), está claro que su filosofía es un hito en el pensamiento contemporáneo cuya claridad hace accesible y siempre sugerente.

[Maddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wanted to keep reading this one, Rorty is pretty good at looking from a perspective of gradual process and is a nice break from reading stuff with intent to break a new event or trying to radically subvert how we interpret the world,ø.

[Margaret Hrezo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Never a Rorty fan, although I have taught as a sort of postmodernism-lite.

[Carl Gladish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rorty is my hero.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Readable postmodernism.

[Gerald Sigmund · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know nothing about Dewey but it feels as if he is mythologizing him way too much. His essays on Lyotard are horrible, cowardly apologia of the status quo

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE FIRST VOLUME OF RORTY’S COLLECTED PAPERS

Richard McKay Rorty (1931-2007) was an American philosopher, who taught at Princeton, the University of Virginia, Stanford University, etc.

He wrote in the Introduction to this 1991 collection, “This is the first volume of a collection of papers written between 1980 and 1989. The papers in this volume take up, for the most part, issues and figures within analytic philosophy… The six papers that make up Part I of this volume offer an antirepresentationalist account of the relation between natural science and the rest of culture… I mean [an account] which does not view knowledge as a matter of getting reality right, but rather as a matter of acquiring habits of action for coping with reality.”

He states, “it is not clear why ‘relativist’ should be thought an appropriate term for the ethnocentric third view, the one which the pragmatist DOES hold. For the pragmatist is not holding a positive theory which says that something is relative to something else. He is, instead, making the purely NEGATIVE point that we should drop the traditional distinction between knowledge and opinion, construed as the distinction between truth as correspondence to reality and truth as a commendatory term for well-justified beliefs. The reason that the realist calls this negative claim ‘relativist’ is that he cannot believe that anybody would seriously deny that truth has an intrinsic nature… the pragmatist does not have a theory of truth, much less a relativistic one… his account of the value of cooperative human inquiry has only an ethical base, not an epistemological or metaphysical one.” (Pg. 23-24)

He explains, “What I am calling ‘pragmatism’ might also be called ‘left-wing Kuhnianism.’ It has been also been rather endearingly called … the ‘new fuzziness,’ because it is an attempt to blur just those distinctions between the objective and the subjective and between fact and value which the critical conception of rationality has developed. We fuzzies would like to substitute the idea of ‘unforced agreement’ for that of ‘objectivity.’” (Pg. 38)

He acknowledges, “From a Wittgensteinian or Davidsonian or Deweyan angle, there is no such thing as the ‘best explanation’ of anything; there is just the explanation which best suits the purpose of some given explainer.” (Pg. 60) Later, he says, “Pragmatism views knowledge not as a relation between mind and an object, but, roughly, as the ability to get agreement by using persuasion rather than force.” (Pg. 88)

He suggests, “I see [Donald] Davidson as the culmination of the holist and pragmatist strains in contemporary analytic philosophy.” (Pg. 117) He added, “like [William] James… Davidson is not giving us a new ‘theory of truth.’ Rather, he is giving us reasons for thinking that we can safely get along with less philosophizing about truth than we had thought we needed.” (Pg. 139) But later, he admits, “Though my own leanings are obviously toward radicalism, I have not attempted to adjudicate the issue between Davidson’s quick and dirty dissolution of the traditional problematic and Sellars’ attempt at a happy ‘via media.’ I have merely tried to get that issue into sharper focus.” (Pg. 161)

He summarizes, “In the form John Dewey gave it, pragmatism is a philosophy tailored to the needs of political liberalism, a way of making political liberalism look good to persons with philosophical tastes. It provides a rationale for nonideological, compromising, reformist muddling-through (what Dewey called ‘experimentalism’).” (Pg. 211)

This is an exceptionally-useful collection of Rorty’s papers, that will be “must reading” for anyone studying Rorty’s thought.

[christian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rorty, like many other pragmatists rattles with incoherence. He emphasizes his stance against universals -- or any metaphysical positions -- yet carelessly writes "sense", "better", "progression", etc., all tacit claims of Truth: contour lines of interpretation of our being. Rorty's retort: these are ephemeral labels, as History marches on to unveil a truer Truth (or, in his terms, a more useful concept for the temporal event). Of course, this isn’t a blind telos, postmodern bourgeois liberalism restrains the collar of its people: the pulled noose of Justice and Freedom. Rorty acknowledges Hegel’s phenomenological approach but refuses to recognize the Will and Violence required to make his postmodern liberal bourgeois project work. Justice and Freedom persist because they make sense, not because of visceral force enforcing the floating universal signifier. To him its middle managers and specialists that correctly reweave the unfolding of the Democratic project -- somehow they transcend metaphysical thinking -- stakes are never claimed -- as there's a mythical self-correcting mechanism that accesses the Better understanding of things. Specialists are considered better than theologians because specialists produce what works. Specialists somehow avoid the problem of interpretation -- their epistemology somehow reliable, and in it's unreliability, it's the most reliable at-that-time, ergo, it's better: better, more reliable, yet outside of metaphysics ... Rorty never explains how this is done. Rorty blindly believes that this is self-correcting, yet outside metaphysics. What's the Duhem–Quine problem to Rorty?
He confronts Lyotard! Rorty avoids confronting Libidinal Economy; rather, he addresses Lyotard's much softer work, The Postmodern Condition. Even then, Rorty fails to refute anything.
What exists isn’t Power concatenating senseless noise under the preconfigured foundationalism of postmodern bourgeois liberalism; but rather, an impartial, prudent Justice that fairly deliberates its choice, always picking the best.

[Shaun · Rating 4 out of 5]

I teetered between really liked it and really, really liked it. Not quite amazing, but still a great book. I probably would have enjoyed it much more it I have previously read Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (that's in the works.) If you are afraid of question-begging, the de-divinization of science and liberal democracy stand clear; this book is for true pragmatists! I'm overstating things, but, a great follow up of CIS, this book picks up where it left off; on solidarity.
In a few words, solidarity is the relation a human life has to her community as opposed to some nonhuman reality; whether it be God, Truth (with a capital T,)or Reality. The essays in this book reflect that, as well as the role of science in society, Davidson of truth and metaphor, and liberalism as solidarity.


Those of you unaware, Rorty is an amalgamation of Donald Davidson, Dewey, Bernard Williams, William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, W.V.O. Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, and Jurgen Habermas with anti-representationalism, anti-realism, anti-rationalism, and liberalism sprinkled in to keep it from being insipid. You do the math.

[Giorgi · Rating 4 out of 5]

it is a very well written book, mostly Rorty is talking about the main ideas of pragmatic philosophy and its practical implication such as solidarity, science and democracy. pragmatism as it is understood by Rorty is not a philosophy at all, but the method of production practical activities. i don't like all of his ideas but his writings are very fascinating.

[Marcus Vinicius · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. Rorty exposed his understandings of pragmatism and the role of philosophy. The metaphysicals concepts were put aside. The Stanford's Professor tried to elaborate a democratic conception in which solidarity preceeds objectivity.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Rorty. This book is a great introduction to pragmatism.

[Leonard Pierce · Rating 4 out of 5]

More academic and not as engaging as some of his other works, this is still essential Rorty -- a great way to see his thoughts and theories develop and key for a deeper understanding of his ideas.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rorty as the analytic philosopher ... or the anti-analytic philosopher

[Janelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had to read this for a class

[Leonardo]

Filosofía del Lenguaje. Unidad VII.