Draft:Richard Rorty

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Richard McKay Rorty (1931–2007) was an American philosopher widely considered to be among the most important English-language philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. Rorty had the peculiar status of being something of a public intellectual in a time when philosophy in the United States had solidified into a fairly technical discipline with an increasingly limited impact on what goes on outside of an academic research environment. Rorty considered himself to be a pragmatist and is one of the principal authors responsible for the serious academic re-consideration of the works of John Dewey and William James in American philosophy departments. Although Rorty did not stray much from writing about his same core interests throughout his career—above all, the place of the correspondence theory of truth in philosophy and Western culture at large—he was, by his own admission, not interested in constructing a systematic philosophy. For this reason, it is difficult to summarize his thought in the form of a single connected scheme of ideas. The approach taken below is to treat the issues on which Rorty had particularly controversial things to say especially in regards to science and truth.

Rorty and science

Rorty's view on the scientific enterprise in the West is generally positive: he commends it for improving the quality of life of people around the world, acknowledges that it has played a progressive political role in proliferating liberal-democratic institutions, and given us a path to spiritual liberation where the happiness of our fellow human-beings is the only moral justification we would ever need. (especially since the work of Darwin). In this way Rorty can be seen not as a critic of the well-worn procedures which allow us to add to the body of scientific knowledge, but as trying to show scientists that they have not been holding themselves to their own standards of empiricism and have been allowing an unobservable metaphysics to percolate in the background. While Rorty surely possessed some expertise in certain areas of mathematics, especially mathematical logic, he never contributed directly to scientific research himself. It is therefore wise to approach some of his claims about science with extra scrutiny. Rorty was routinely criticized by his scientist-philosopher colleagues (notably Daniel Dennett and Hilary Putnam) as doing undue harm to science or spreading dangerous ideas that could potentially undermine the public trust in science. Part of this stemmed from his milieu’s aversion to his scholarly engagement with the works of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. The way he worked the ideas of these thinkers into his own philosophy was not naïve to their faults: if he endorsed one of their ideas or lines of argument it was almost never without his own qualifications. Moreover, Rorty aspired to be as transparent as possible in his writings and resolutely avoided the obscurantism sometimes charged of his literary heroes.

Narrative vs. argument

To make his point, Rorty offers historical narratives nearly as often as he argues deductively. The boundary between these two techniques isn’t firm: he may write as if the narrative as a whole establishes some single premise which will then be used in a deductive argument, or in the midst of historical recounting make indications as to what he takes to be true premises. Some themes that appear repeatedly as the subject of these narratives are: (1) the accomplishments of the major figures in Western philosophy and how that makes the historical playing field look for contemporary philosophy, (2) culturally inherited stories the Western 'high culture' has told about itself, and (3) . The reason one ought to pay so close an attention to the structure and genre of narrative in Rorty’s work is that his narrative passages tend to contain his more controversial claims, and it is quite unusual (at least in the era he wrote) for an analytic philosopher to write in the narrative mode in the first place. Rorty also seems to generally agree with the claim that there is no way to formulate a criterion that would allow us to assign degrees of truthfulness to different narratives about the same subject. In respect to this view of interpretation, Rorty readily identified himself as belonging to the same camp as his French contemporaries Foucault and Derrida, and this was enough to earn him the ire of nearly all his colleagues in the philosophy department at Princeton.

Is Rorty really a pragmatist?

Rorty identifies his more provocative claims as lessons he learned not only from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and "the French thinkers he so admires" but also from American pragmatist philosophers William James and John Dewey. In fact, Rorty tries to argue that the former can all be considered pragmatists to some degree. To Rorty’s mind the watchwords of pragmatism were “to be true is merely to be good in the way of belief” which owe their due to James. This is to say that Rorty thinks all the philosophers listed above embody this phrase. Rorty’s understanding of it is a different story. The philosopher Cheryl Misaak (an expert on the history of pragmatism) has written multiple books taking him to task for it. His (more sympathetic) colleague Hilary Putnam was none too pleased either. Their main criticism is that Rorty distorts the intended meaning of the aforementioned remark by James and others like it or, considering that James was inconsistent about the import of this point in his other writings, it ought not to be given the primacy of place which Rorty bestows to it. (although they would probably otherwise agree that the quote is a good summary of his philosophical mission taken on the whole).