Quotations from several of Richard Rorty's books and articles, arranged in no particular order under ill-defined headings. See the references for details of quoted texts.
I commend Rorty's writings: they are provocative, insightful and exciting.
Truth
Rorty believes 'truth' cannot mean accurate correspondence between human ideas and a world outside. Rather it is 'a commendatory term for well-justified beliefs.' (Rorty, 1991a: 24)
'...the pragmatist does not have a theory of truth... As a partisan of solidarity, his account of the value of cooperative human inquiry has only an ethical base, not an epistemological or metaphysical one.' (Rorty, 1991a: 23)
'...'knowledge' is, like 'truth', simply a compliment paid to the beliefs which we think so well justified that, for the moment, further justification is not needed.' (Rorty, 1991a: 24)
'The sort of thing philosophers typically have said
- that truth is some sort of correspondence to, or accurate representation
of, reality - seemed empty and pointless to many 19th century idealists, and
also to Dewey...
Within (an evolutionary story) it is easy
to think of beliefs... as habits of action, patterns of complex behaviour...
Even if one chooses to treat sufficiently complex neurological configurations
as representations,
the question of their accuracy seems to collapse immediately into that of
their utility.' (Rorty, 1998: 19-20)
'The central question Searle raises is whether, if you do not believe in mind-independent reality, you can still believe in, and insist upon, objectivity. Philosopers on my side of the argument answer that objectivity is not a matter of corresponding to objects but a matter of getting together with other subjects - that there is nothing to objectivity except intersubjectivity.' (Rorty, 1998: 71-72)
'(Dewey) taught us to call 'true' whatever belief
results from a free and open encounter of opinions, without asking whether
this result agrees with something beyond that encounter... he says simply
that we have no better criterion of truth than that it is what results from
such encounters.
This account of truth... amounts to putting aside the notion that truth is
correspondence to reality. More generally, it puts aside the idea that inquiry
aims at accurately representing what lies outside the human mind.'
(Rorty, 1999: 119)
'An early stage of Enlightenment comes when one reads Nietzsche and begins thinking of all these dualisms as just so many metaphors for the contrast between an imagined state of total power and control and one's own present impotence.' (Rorty, 1999: 133)
Note the proviso in parentheses to realise that you don't need to be a fully
paid-up pragmatist to have problems with the notion of 'truth' when applied
to human affairs (e.g. education):
'For (a non-pragmatist, e.g.) Wright
truth, considered as a desirable non-causal relation between language and
non-language, is a goal of... inquiry (if only in those areas of culture,
such as physical science, for which 'realism' is thought appropriate).'
(Rorty, 1998: 21)
'...everything... is socially constructed, for no vocabulary (e.g. that of zoology or physics) cuts reality at the joints. Reality has no joints. It just has descriptions - some more socially useful than others.' (Rorty, 1998: 83, footnote)
'From a pragmatist point of view, to say that what is rational for us now to believe may not be true, is simply to say that somebody may come up with a better idea.' (Rorty, 1991a: 23)
Hope
'One result of the adoption of our views might be, for example, that physics-envy will become less prevalent...Sociologists and psychologists might stop asking themselves whether they are following rigorous scientific procedures and start asking themselves whether they have any suggestions to make to their fellow citizens about how our lives, or our institutions, should be changed.' (Rorty, 1998: 69-70)
'(Hegel's switch) helped us to stop talking about the way things were always meant to be... and begin talking about the way things never were but might, with our help, become.' (Rorty, 1998: 233)
'For Dewey,... socialization consisted in acquiring an image of themselves as heirs to a tradition of increasing liberty and rising hope... Dewey wanted the inculcation of this narrative of freedom and hope to be the core of its socializing process.' (Rorty, 1999: 121-122)
'...a narrative of national hope... (set) in the larger context of a narrative of world history and literature,... against the background of the world picture offered by the natural scientists.' (Rorty, 1999: 122)
Inquiry
'If Dewey and Davidson were asked, 'What is the goal of inquiry?' the best either could say would be that it has many different goals, none of which have any metaphysical presuppositions - for example, getting what we want, the improvement of man's estate, convinceing as many audiences as possible, solving as many problems as possible.' (Rorty, 1998: 38-39)
'(A distinction) between knowing what you want to get out of a person or thing or text in advance and hoping that the person or thing or text will help you want something different - that he or she or it will help you to change your purposes, and thus to change your life.' (Rorty, 1999: 145)
'Unmethodical criticism of the sort which one occasionally wants to call 'inspired' is the result of an encounter with an author, character, plot, stanza, line or archaic torso which has made a difference to the critic's conception of who she is, what she is good for, what she wants to do with herself: an encounter which has rearranged her priorities and purposes. Such criticism uses the author or text not as a specimen reiterating a type but as an occasion for changing a previously accepted taxonomy, or for putting a new twist on a previously told story. Its respect for the author or the text is not a matter of respect for an intentio or for an internal structure. Indeed, 'respect' is the wrong word. 'Love' or 'hate' would be better. For a great love or a great loathing is the sort of thing that changes us by changing our purposes, changing the uses to which we shall put people and things and texts we encounter later.' (Rorty, 1999: 145)
If 'truth' cannot be the goal of inquiry then what is the justification for
the particular practices investigated, or, indeed, for inquiry itself?
'...for Darwinians... there is an obvious advantage
in dropping the idea of a distinct goal or norm called 'truth' - the goal
of scientific inquiry, but not, for example, of carpentry. On a Deweyan view,
the difference between the carpenter and the scientist is simply the difference
between a workman who justifies his actions mainly by reference to the movements
of matter and one who justifies his mainly by reference to the behaviour of
his colleagues.' (Rorty, 1998: 40-41)
'...justification is not by reference to a criterion, but by reference to various detailed practical advantages...' (Rorty, 1991a: 28)
What is the consequence of dropping the search for 'truth'?
'(The) substitution of objectivity-as-intersubjectivity
for objectivity-as-accurate-representation... will not change our practices...
But we may change our attitudes towards (them), our sense of why it is important
to carry them out... it will be better... because it will take away a few
more excuses for fanaticism and intolerance.' (Rorty, 1998: 83)
'...inquiry as the continual reweaving of a web of beliefs.' (Rorty, 1991a: 26)
'I think that Feyerabend is right in suggesting that until we discard the metaphor of inquiry... as converging rather than proliferating, as becoming more unified rater than more diverse, we shall never be free of the motives which once led us to posit gods... If we could ever be moved solely by the desire for solidarity... then we should think of human progress as making it possible for human beings to do more interesting things and be more interesting people, not as heading towards a place which has somehow been prepared for humanity in advance. Our self-image would employ images of making rather than finding.' (Rorty, 1991a: 27-28)
Theory and Practice
This long passage shows that philosophical perspectives are superfluous in
many situations. (Perhaps substitute the word 'theoretical' in place of 'philosophical'?
This fits the argument into the context of an educational inquiry without
doing too much violence to the text.):
'(An anti-pragmatist stance) assumes
that the relation between a belief about the nature of truth and certain social
practices is presuppositional. A practice presupposes a belief only if dropping
the belief constitutes a good reason for altering the practice...
(There is) the general question of whether
any social practice
has philosophical,
as well as empirical, presuppositions...
Although the empirical-philosophical distinction is itself pretty fuzzy, it
is generally agreed that a belief is on the empirical end of the spectrum
to the extent that we are clear about what would falsify it... when it comes
to a philosophical belief... nobody is very clear about what it would take
to make us believe or disbelieve it. Nobody is sure what counts for or against
such propositions.
The reasons for this are the same as the reasons why it is unclear whether,
if we stopped believing these propositions, we should need to change our practices.
Philosophical views are just not tied very closely either to observation and
experiment or to practice. This is why they are sometimes dismissed as
merely philosophical,
where 'merely' suggests that views on these subjects are optional - that most
people, for most purposes, can get along without any. But precisely to the
extent that such views are in fact optional, social practices do not
have philosophical presuppositions. The philosophical
propositions said to be presuppositional turn out to be rhetorical ornaments
of practice rather than foundations of practice. This is because we have much
more confidence in the practice in question than in any of its possible philosophical
justifications.' (Rorty, 1998: 64)
Does a theoretical (philosophical) perspective matter?
'So far I have argued that philosophy does not make
much difference to our practices and that it should not be allowed to do so.
(But) we pragmatists say that every difference
must make a difference to practice...
We... can make our position consistent, I think, by saying that although they
don't matter much in the short run, they may well matter in the long run.'
(Rorty, 1998: 76)
'One (way of making a difference) is by slowly, over a long period of time, changing what Wittgenstein called the pictures that hold us captive. We will always be held captive by some picture or other, for this is merely to say we shall never escape from language or metaphor... But old pictures may have disadvantages that can be avoided by the sketching of new pictures.' (Rorty, 1998: 80)
A modest goal for theory-builders:
'...a preference for small concrete compromises over
large theoretical syntheses would accord with Dewey's pragmatic view that
theory is to be encouraged only when likely to facilitate practice.'
(Rorty, 1998: 200-201)
'Kuhn suggested that in all these areas (physics, philosophy, literature etc.) we could drop the notion of 'getting close to the way things really are' or 'more fully grasping the essence of...' or 'finding out how it really should be done'. For all of these we can substitute the notion of capitalizing on past successes while at the same time coping with present problems.' (Rorty, 1998, 187)
'...inarticulate know-how...' (Rorty, 1991a: 25)
'...criterionless muddling through...' (Rorty, 1991a: 28)
Metaphor
'Let me open up the topic of metaphor by making
a curt, dogmatic claim: there are three ways in which a new belief can be
added to our previous beliefs, thereby forcing us to reweave the fabric of
our beliefs and desires - viz. perception, inference, and metaphor. Perception
changes our beliefs by intruding a new belief into the network of previous
beliefs... Inference changes our beliefs by making us see that our previous
beliefs commit us to a belief we had not previously held - thereby forcing
us to decide whether to alter those previous beliefs, or instead to explore
the consequences of the new one...
By contrast, to think of metaphor as a third source of beliefs, and thus a
third motive for reweaving our network of beliefs and desires, is to think
of language, logical space, and the realm of possibility as open-ended. It
is to abandon the idea that the aim of thought is the attainment of a God's-eye
view... Metaphor... is a call to change one's language and one's life, rather
than a proposal about how to systematize either.' (Rorty, 1991b: 12-13)
'The pragmatist... thinks of the the thinker as serving the community, and of his thinking as futile unless it is followed up by a reweaving of the community's web of belief. That reweaving will assimilate, by gradually literalizing, the new metaphors which the thinker has provided. The proper honor to pay to new, vibrantly alive metaphors, is to help them become dead metaphors as quickly as possible, to rapidly reduce them to the status of tools of social progress.' (Rorty, 1991b: 17)
Education
'In the liberal democracies of recent times, the
tension between these two attitudes ('left and right', 'radical and
conservative') has been resolved by a fairly simple,
fairly satisfactory compromise. The right has pretty much kept control of
primary and secondary education and the left has gradually got control of
non-vocational higher education... So education up to the age of about 18
or 19 is mostly a matter of socialization - of getting the students to take
over the moral and political common sense of the society as it is. It is obviously
not only that, since sympathetic high school teachers often assist curious
or troubled students by showing them where to find alternatives to this common
sense. But these exceptions cannot be made the rule. For any society has a
right to expect that, whatever else happens in the course of adolescence,
the schools will inculcate most of what is generally believed.
Around the age of 18 or 19, however, American students whose parents are affluent
enough to send them to reasonably good colleges find themselves in the hands
of teachers well to the left of the teachers they met in high school. These
teachers do their best to nudge each successive college generation a little
more to the left, to make them a little more conscious of the cruelty built
into our institutions, of the need for reform, of the need to be sceptical
about the current consensus.' (Rorty, 1999: 116)
'There is only the shaping of an animal into a human being by a process of socialization, followed (with luck) by the self-individualization and self-creation of that human being through his or her own later revolt against that very process.' (Rorty, 1999: 118)
'The point of non-vocational higher education is... to help students realize that they can reshape themselves - that they can rework the self-image foisted on them by their past, the self-image that makes them competent citizens, into a new self-image, one that they themselves have helped to create.' (Rorty, 1999: 118)
'Primary and secondary education will always be a matter of familiarizing the young with what their elders take to be true, whether it is true or not... Socialization has to come before individualization...' (Rorty, 1999: 119)
References
Rorty, R. (1991a) Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Rorty, R. (1991b) Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Rorty, R. (1998) Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Rorty, R. (1999) Philosophy and Social Hope London: Penguin Books
