The following are all quotations taken from the superfluity of the published thoughts of American pragmatist philosopher, Richard Rorty. They are intended to demonstrate, in as non-technical a way as possible that doesn’t assume too much knowledge of either the content or tradition of academic philosophy, that Rorty conceived of “truth” and “knowledge” as decidedly human things, the kind of things which only belief-holding language-users like us would ever have or conceive of needing. They were not, then, for Rorty, properties of nature, the things after which inquiry seeks or towards which we aim, or things we could grasp as such. Instead, they are, and remain, cultural artifacts. Observe and engage:
“Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.”
“The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that. ”
“The orthodox tend to think that people who, like the postmodernists and me, believe neither in God nor in some suitable substitute, must feel that everything is permitted, that everybody can do what they like.”
“The reason for thinking that there will be no 'last' philosophy is simply that no answer can fail to be an answer to a question, and no question can guarantee its own permanent relevance.”
“There is nothing sacred about universality which makes the shared automatically better than the unshared.”
“Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.”
“To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations. The suggestion that truth is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own.”
“There is nothing to be known about anything except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other things. Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on forever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations.”
“Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.”
“There is no way in which tools can take one out of touch with reality. No matter whether the tool is a hammer or a gun or a belief or a statement, tool-using is part of the interaction of the organism with its environment. To see the employment of words as the use of tools to deal with the environment, rather than as an attempt to represent the intrinsic nature of that environment, is to repudiate the question of whether human minds are in touch with reality - the question asked by the epistemological sceptic. No organism, human or non-human, is ever more or less in touch with reality than any other organism. The very idea of ‘being out of touch with reality’ presupposes the un-Darwinian, Cartesian picture of a mind which somehow swings free of the causal forces exerted over the body. The Cartesian mind is an entity whose relations with the rest of the universe are representational rather than causal. So to rid our thinking of the vestiges of Cartesianism, to become fully Darwinian in our thinking, we need to stop thinking of words as representations and to start thinking of them as nodes in the causal network which binds the organism together with its environment.”
“The quest for certainty - even as a long term goal - is an attempt to escape from the world.”
“Language-users can no more help justifying their beliefs and desires to one another than stomachs can help grinding up foodstuffs. The agenda for our digestive organs is set by the particular foodstuffs being processed, and the agenda for our justifying activity is provided by the diverse beliefs and desires we encounter in our fellow language-users. There [could] only be a ‘higher’ aim of inquiry called ‘truth’ if there were such a thing as ultimate justification - justification before God, or before the tribunal of reason, as opposed to any merely finite human audience.”
“Various labels and slogans are associated with [the] antiessentialistic, antimetaphysical movement in various Western traditions… my own preferred term is pragmatism; among the slogans are ‘Everything is a social construction’ and ‘All awareness is a linguistic affair’... I want to show how these two slogans come to much the same thing. Both are ways of saying we shall never be able to step out of language, never be able to grasp reality unmediated by a linguistic description… To say that everything is a social construction is to say that our linguistic practices are so bound up with our other social practices that our descriptions of nature, as well as of ourselves, will always be a function of our social needs. To say that all awareness is a linguistic affair is to say that we have no knowledge of the kind which Bertrand Russell, working in the tradition of British empiricism, called ‘knowledge by acquaintance’. All our knowledge is of the sort which Russell called ‘knowledge by description’. If you put the two slogans together, you get the claim that all our knowledge is under descriptions suited to our current social purposes.”
“For pragmatists, there is no such thing as a nonrelational feature of X, any more than there is such a thing as the intrinsic nature, the essence, of X. So there can be no such thing as a description which matches the way X really is, apart from its relation to human needs or consciousness or language.”
“We suggest that you think of all… objects as resembling numbers in the following respect: there is nothing to be known about them except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other objects. Everything that can serve as the term of a relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on forever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is just not one more nexus of relations.”
“Pragmatists think that if something makes no difference to practice, it should make no difference to [our] philosophy. This conviction makes them suspicious of the distinction between justification and truth, for that difference makes no difference to my decisions about what to do. If I have concrete, specific doubts about whether one of my beliefs is true, I can resolve those doubts only by asking whether it is adequately justified - by finding and assessing additional reasons pro and con. I cannot bypass justification and confine my attention to truth: assessment of truth and assessment of justification are, when the question is about what I should believe now, the same activity… This line of thought suggests to pragmatists that, although there is obviously a lot to be said about justification of various sorts of beliefs, there may be little to say about truth.”
“Nobody thinks there is a chain of causes that makes mountains an effect of thoughts or words. What people like Kuhn, Derrida, and I believe is that it is pointless to ask whether there really are mountains or whether it is merely convenient for us to talk about mountains. We also think it pointless to ask, for example, whether neutrinos are real entities or merely useful heuristic fictions. This is the sort of thing we mean by saying that it is pointless to ask whether reality is independent of our ways of talking about it. Given that it pays to talk about mountains, as it certainly does, one of the obvious truths about mountains is that they were here before we talked about them. If you do not believe that, you probably do not know how to play the language games that employ the word "mountain." But the utility of those language games has nothing to do with the question of whether Reality as It Is in Itself, apart from the way it is handy for human beings to describe it, has mountains in it. That question is about the other, non-causal sense of ‘independence.’”
“Those who wish to ground solidarity in objectivity - call them "realists" - have to construe truth as correspondence to reality. So they must construct a metaphysics which has room for a special relation between beliefs and objects which will differentiate true from false beliefs. They also must argue that there are procedures of justification of belief which are natural and not merely local. So they must construct an epistemology which has room for a kind of justification which is not merely social but natural, springing from human nature itself, and made possible by a link between that part of nature and the rest of nature. On their view, the various procedures which are thought of as providing rational justification by one or another culture may or may not really be rational. For to be truly rational, procedures of justification must lead to the truth, to correspondence to reality, to the intrinsic nature of things.
By contrast, those who wish to reduce objectivity to solidarity - call them "pragmatists" - do not require either a metaphysics or an epistemology. They view truth as, in William James' phrase, what is good for us to believe. So they do not need an account of a relation between beliefs and objects called 'correspondence,' nor an account of human cognitive abilities which ensures that our species is capable of entering into that relation. They see the gap between truth and justification not as something to be bridged by isolating a natural and trans-cultural sort of rationality which can be used to criticize certain cultures and praise others, but simply as the gap between the actual good and the possible better. 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. It is to say that there is always room for improved belief, since new evidence, or new hypotheses, or a whole new vocabulary, may come along. For pragmatists, the desire for objectivity is not the desire to escape the limitations of one's community, but simply the desire for as much intersubjective agreement as possible, the desire to extend the reference of "us" as far as we can. Insofar as pragmatists make a distinction between knowledge and opinion, it is simply the distinction between topics on which such agreement is relatively easy to get and topics on which agreement is relatively hard to get.”
“The question of whether truth or rationality has an intrinsic nature, of whether we ought to have a positive theory about either topic, is just the question of whether our self-description ought to be constructed around a relation to human nature or around a relation to a particular collection of human beings, whether we should desire objectivity or solidarity. It is hard to see how one could choose between these alternatives by looking more deeply into the nature of knowledge, or of man, or of nature. Indeed, the proposal that this issue might be so settled begs the question in favor of the realist, for it presupposes that knowledge, man, and nature have real essences which are relevant to the problem at hand. For the pragmatist, by contrast, "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. An inquiry into the nature of knowledge can, on his view, only be a sociohistorical account of how various people have tried to reach agreement on what to believe.”
“One way of formulating the pragmatist position is to say that the pragmatist recognizes relations of justification holding between beliefs and desires, and relations of causation holding between these beliefs and desires and other items in the universe, but no relations of representation. Beliefs do not represent nonbeliefs. There are, to be sure, relations of aboutness, in the attenuated senses in which Riemann's axioms are about Riemannian space, Meinong talks about round squares, and Shakespeare's play is about Hamlet. But in this vegetarian sense of aboutness, there is no problem about how a belief can be about the unreal or the impossible. For aboutness is not a matter of pointing outside the web [of beliefs]. Rather, we use the term "about" as a way of directing attention to the beliefs which are relevant to the justification of other beliefs, not as a way of directing attention to nonbeliefs.”
“There is no way to divide the world up into internal and external relations, nor into intrinsic vs. extrinsic properties — nor, indeed, into things that are intrinsically relations and things that are intrinsically terms of relations. For once one sees inquiry as reweaving beliefs rather than discovering the natures of objects, there are no candidates for self-subsistent, independent entities save individual beliefs — individual sentential attitudes. But these are very bad candidates indeed. For a belief is what it is only by virtue of its position in a web. Once we view the "representation" and "aboutness" relations (which some philosophers have supposed to "fix the content" of belief) as fallout from a given contextualization of those beliefs, a belief becomes simply a position in a web. It is a disposition on the part of the web to react to certain additions or deletions in certain ways. In this respect it is like a thing's value or its valence — it is just a disposition to respond in various ways to various stimuli.”
“A lot of what Nietzsche had to say can be viewed as following from his claim that "`knowledge in itself' is as impermissible a concept as 'thing-in-itself'" and his suggestion that "[the categories of reason] represent nothing more than the expediency of a certain race and species — their utility alone is their 'truth'."
“A pragmatist must insist that both redescribability and irreducibility are cheap. It is never very hard to redescribe anything one likes in terms that are irreducible to, indefinable in the terms of, a previous description of that thing. A pragmatist must also insist… that there is no such thing as the way the thing is in itself, under no description, apart from any use to which human beings might want to put it. The advantage of insisting on these points is that any dualism one comes across, any divide which one finds a philosopher trying to bridge or fill in, can be made to look like a mere difference between two sets of descriptions of the same batch of things.
"Can be made to look like," in this context, does not contrast with "really is." It is not as if there were a procedure for finding out whether one is really dealing with two batches of things or one batch. Thinghood, identity, is itself description-relative. Nor is it the case that language really is just strings of marks and noises which organisms use as tools for getting what they want. That Nietzschean-Deweyan description of language is no more the real truth about language than Heidegger's description of it as "the house of Being" or Derrida's as "the play of signifying references." Each of these is only one more useful truth about language — one more of what Wittgenstein called "reminders for a particular purpose."”
“Here is one way to look at physics: there are some invisible things which are parts of everything else and whose behavior determines the way everything else works. Physics is the search for an accurate description of those invisible things, and it proceeds by finding better and better explanations of the visible. Eventually, by way of microbiological accounts of the mental, and through causal accounts of the mechanisms of language, we shall be able to see the physicists' accumulation of truths about the world as itself a transaction between these invisible things.
Here is another way of looking at physics: the physicists are men looking for new interpretations of the Book of Nature. After each pedestrian period of normal science, they dream up a new model, a new picture, a new vocabulary, and then they announce that the true meaning of the Book has been discovered. But, of course, it never is, any more than the true meaning of Coriolanus or the Dunciad or the Phenomenology of Spirit, or the Philosophical Investigations. What makes them physicists is that their writings are commentaries on the writings of earlier interpreters of Nature, not that they all are somehow "talking about the same thing," the invisibilia Dei sive naturae toward which their inquiries steadily converge.
Here is a way of thinking about right and wrong: the common moral consciousness contains certain intuitions concerning equality, fairness, human dignity, and the like, which need to be made explicit through the formulation of principles - principles of the sort which can be used to write legislation. By thinking about puzzle-cases, and by abstracting from differences between our (European) culture and others, we can formulate better and better principles, principles corresponding ever more closely to the moral law itself.
Here is another way of thinking about right and wrong: the longer men or cultures live, the more phronesis they may, with luck, acquire - the more sensitivity to others, the more delicate a typology for describing their fellows and themselves. Mingling with others helps; Socratic discussion helps; but since the Romantics, we have been helped most of all by the poets, the novelists, and the ideologues. Since the Phenomenology of Spirit taught us to see not only the history of philosophy, but that of Europe, as portions of a Bildungsroman, we have not striven for moral knowledge as a kind of episteme. Rather, we have seen Europe's self-descriptions, and our own self-descriptions, not as ordered to subject matter, but as designs in a tapestry which they will still be weaving after we, and Europe, die.
Here is a way of looking at philosophy: from the beginning, philosophy has worried about the relation between thought and its object, representation and represented. The old problem about reference to the inexistent, for example, has been handled in various unsatisfactory ways because of a failure to distinguish properly philosophical questions about meaning and reference from extraneous questions motivated by scientific, ethical, and religious concerns. Once these questions are properly isolated, however, we can see philosophy as a field which has its center in a series of questions about the relations between words and the world. The recent purifying move from talk of ideas to talk of meanings had dissipated the epistemological skepticism which motivated much of past philosophy. This has left philosophy a more limited, but more self-conscious, rigorous, and coherent area of inquiry.
Here is another way of looking at philosophy: philosophy started off as a confused combination of the love of wisdom and the love of argument. It began with Plato's notion that the rigor of mathematical argumentation exposed, and could be used to correct, the pretensions of the politicians and the poets. As philosophical thought changed and grew, inseminated by this ambivalent eros, it produced shoots which took root on their own. Both wisdom and argumentation became far more various than Plato dreamed. Given such nineteenth-century complications as the Bildungsroman, non-Euclidean geometries, ideological historiography, the literary dandy, and the political anarchist, there is no way in which one can isolate philosophy as occupying a distinctive place in culture or concerned with a distinctive subject or proceeding by some distinctive method. One cannot even seek an essence for philosophy as an academic Fach (because one would first have to choose the country in whose universities' catalogs one was to look). The philosophers' own scholastic little definitions of "philosophy" are merely polemical devices intended to exclude from the field of honor those whose pedigrees are unfamiliar. We can pick out "the philosophers" in the contemporary intellectual world only by noting who is commenting on a certain sequence of historical figures. All that "philosophy" as a name for a sector of culture means is "talk about Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Russell. . . and that lot." Philosophy is best seen as a kind of writing. It is delimited, as is any literary genre, not by form or matter, but by tradition - a family romance involving, e.g., Father Parmenides, honest old Uncle Kant, and bad brother Derrida.
There, then, are two ways of thinking about various things. I have drawn them up as reminders of the differences between a philosophical tradition which began, more or less, with Kant, and one which began, more or less, with Hegel's Phenomenology. The first tradition thinks of truth as a vertical relationship between representations and what is represented. The second tradition thinks of truth horizontally - as the culminating reinterpretation of our predecessors' reinterpretation of their predecessors' reinterpretation. . . . This tradition does not ask how representations are related to nonrepresentations, but how representations can be seen as hanging together. The difference is not one between "correspondence" and "coherence" theories of truth - though these so-called theories are partial expressions of this contrast. Rather, it is the difference between regarding truth, goodness, and beauty as eternal objects which we try to locate and reveal, and regarding them as artifacts whose fundamental design we often have to alter. The first tradition takes scientific truth as the center of philosophical concern (and scorns the notion of incommensurable scientific world-pictures). It asks how well other fields of inquiry conform to the model of science. The second tradition takes science as one (not especially privileged nor interesting) sector of culture, a sector which, like all the other sectors, only makes sense when viewed historically. The first likes to present itself as a straightforward, down-to-earth, scientific attempt to get things right. The second needs to present itself obliquely, with the help of as many foreign words and as much allusiveness and name-dropping as possible. Neo-Kantian philosophers like Putnam, Strawson, and Rawls have arguments and theses which are connected to Kant's by a fairly straightforward series of "purifying" transformations, transformations which are thought to give clearer and clearer views of the persistent problems. For the non-Kantian philosophers, there are no persistent problems - save perhaps the existence of the Kantians. Non-Kantian philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida are emblematic figures who not only do not solve problems, they do not have arguments or theses. They are connected with their predecessors not by common subjects or methods but in the "family resemblance" way in which latecomers in a sequence of commentators on commentators are connected with older members of the same sequence.”
“A postmetaphysical culture seems to me no more impossible than a postreligious one, and equally desirable.”
“Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define the word “true” or “good,” supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area. It might, of course, have turned out otherwise. People have, oddly enough, found something interesting to say about the essence of Force and the definition of “number.” They might have found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they haven’t. The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call “philosophy”—a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean that they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions any more. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that “there is no such thing” as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a “relativistic” or “subjectivist” theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject. They are in a position analogous to that of secularists who urge that research concerning the Nature, or the Will, of God does not get us anywhere. Such secularists are not saying that God does not exist, exactly; they feel unclear about what it would mean to affirm His existence, and thus about the point of denying it. Nor do they have some special, funny, heretical view about God. They just doubt that the vocabulary of theology is one we ought to be using. Similarly, pragmatists keep trying to find ways of making anti-philosophical points in non-philosophical language. For they face a dilemma if their language is too unphilosophical, too “literary,” they will be accused of changing the subject; if it is too philosophical it will embody Platonic assumptions which will make it impossible for the pragmatist to state the conclusion she wants to reach.”
“Questions such as “Does truth exist?” or “Do you believe in truth?” seem fatuous and pointless. Everybody knows that the difference between true and false beliefs is as important as that between nourishing and poisonous foods. Moreover, one of the principal achievements of recent analytic philosophy is to have shown that the ability to wield the concept of “true belief” is a necessary condition for being a user of language, and thus for being a rational agent.
Nevertheless, the question “Do you believe in truth or are you one of those frivolous postmodernists?” is often the first one that journalists ask intellectuals whom they are assigned to interview. That question now plays the role previously played by the question “Do you believe in God, or are you one of those dangerous atheists?”. Literary types are frequently told that they do not love truth sufficiently. Such admonitions are delivered in the same tones in which their predecessors were reminded that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Obviously, the sense of the word “truth” invoked by that question is not the everyday one. Nobody is worried about a mere nominalization of the adjective “true”. The question “do you believe that truth exists?” is shorthand for something like “Do you think that there is a natural terminus to inquiry, a way things really are, and that understanding what that way is will tell us what to do with ourselves?”
Those who, like myself, find themselves accused of postmodernist frivolity do not think that there is such a terminus. We think that inquiry is just another name for problem-solving, and we cannot imagine inquiry into how human beings should live, into what we should make of ourselves, coming to an end. For solutions to old problems will produce fresh problems, and so on forever. As with the individual, so with both the society and the species: each stage of maturation will overcome previous dilemmas only by creating new ones.”
“A poeticized, or post-metaphysical, culture is one in which the imperative that is common to religion and metaphysics - to find an ahistorical, transcultural matrix for one's thinking, something into which everything can fit, independent of one's time and place - has dried up and blown away. It would be a culture in which people thought of human beings as creating their own life-world, rather than as being responsible to God or "the nature of reality," which tells them what kind it is.”
“What is disturbing about the pragmatist's picture is not that it is relativistic but that it takes away two sorts of metaphysical comfort to which our intellectual tradition has become accustomed. One is the thought that membership in our biological species carries with it certain "rights," a notion which does not seem to make sense unless the biological similarities entail the possession of something nonbiological, something which links our species to a nonhuman reality and thus gives the species moral dignity. This picture of rights as biologically transmitted is so basic to the political discourse of the Western democracies that we are troubled by any suggestion that "human nature" is not a useful moral concept. The second comfort is provided by the thought that our community cannot wholly die. The picture of a common human nature oriented towards correspondence to reality as it is in itself comforts us with the thought that even if our civilization is destroyed, even if all memory of our political or intellectual or artistic community is erased, the race is fated to recapture the virtues and the insights and the achievements which were the glory of that community. The notion of human nature as an inner structure which leads all members of the species to converge to the same point, to recognize the same theories, virtues, and works of art as worthy of honor, assures us that even if the Persians had won, the arts and sciences of the Greeks would sooner or later have appeared elsewhere. It assures us that even if the Orwellian bureaucrats of terror rule for a thousand years the achievements of the Western democracies will someday be duplicated by our remote descendants. It assures us that "man will prevail," that something reasonably like our world-view, our virtues, our art, will bob up again whenever human beings are left alone to cultivate their inner natures. The comfort of the realist picture is the comfort of saying not simply that there is a place prepared for our race in our advance, but also that we now know quite a bit about what that place looks like. The inevitable ethnocentrism to which we are all condemned is thus as much a part of the realist's comfortable view as of the pragmatist's uncomfortable one.
The pragmatist gives up the first sort of comfort because he thinks that to say that certain people have certain rights is merely to say that we should treat them in certain ways. It is not to give a reason for treating them in those ways. As to the second sort of comfort, he suspects that the hope that something resembling us will inherit the earth is impossible to eradicate, as impossible as eradicating the hope of surviving our individual deaths through some satisfying transfiguration. But he does not want to turn this hope into a theory of the nature of man. He wants solidarity to be our only comfort, and to be seen not to require metaphysical support.”
Richard Rorty put forward statements and arguments like these for round about 35 years from the early 70s until his death from cancer in 2007. In doing so, he became infamous, in some circles, almost to the degree that his contemporary, Jacques Derrida, did. Yet the controversy of his views to some, those we can see him often arguing against in his truly prolific amount of output from academic books and journals, to interviews and pieces for the general public, is not important to me here. Instead, Rorty’s pragmatism is meant, like Nietzsche’s strong philosophical poetry from There is nothing to stick to, to act as a goad to our thinking, to pose the possibility of another point of view. That point of view in this case, as with what I took to be Nietzsche's view that there is nothing to stick to, for all human beings do is an act of self-creation, is that nature is not a matter of knowledge or truth. So it is not a matter of something we can or should know anything ‘pure’ about except in a very vulgar sense more akin to ‘experience regarding’ or ‘familiarity with’. Nature does not have a truth it can communicate to us and, if we do things ‘the right way’, a way that can, we think, be discovered, we will not attain knowledge of a natural, non-humanistic kind, which trumps any other kind of knowledge we might get by other means. Therefore, our interaction with nature is not about piercing to its essence or ‘getting it right’. Rather, it is simply a matter of interaction with it and that interaction causing us to hold beliefs about it and have predispositions towards it which our normal activities within it as an environment have caused us to have.
And this is really all I want to say about it although you can surely glean much more than that from a reading of the Rorty quotes I have replicated above or from his wider work in general which riffs on similar and associated themes. This is because, for me, it is the realisation that nature is not the holder of some knowledge intrinsic to itself or the guardian of some Edenic truth to which we do not have access, but which we need to ‘be in the right’, that is the gateway to walking a different path, one in which there is nothing to stick to because nature does not have any instructions for us about how to live. It is simply our environment and we can interact with it in any ways it causes us to. It means that life, and the nature that gives it birth, is not about epistemology, is not about what we know and how we know it and making certain that we have done things the right way in order to gain access to such precious truth nuggets as ‘the Good’ or ‘the True’. It means that what we know and what we call ‘the truth’ are not arbiters of if we are on the right or wrong paths in life. It means, in fact, that in terms of life itself there are no such paths for nature does not designate paths which are the right ones and paths which are the wrong ones, at least, not as things separate from us and our concerns and interests which we could not help having. It means that we make our own paths but only on the understanding that we cannot just make any paths for we will always know some things and always call some things true and others false which is to say only that we will always interact with our environment. This environment, in turn, will always contextualise our choices, shape our beliefs and limit our felt options. So the alternative to ‘knowledge’ or ‘the truth’, or even ‘the Good’, is not ‘anything goes’. It is, instead, just precisely those circumstances we find ourselves in as the people we are. ‘Knowledge’ and ‘the truth’, even on Rorty’s philosophy, are never just our’s to pick and choose. In fact, it is genuinely difficult to find anyone who has ever thought they were. Nature constrains us all, just not necessarily in the same way for we have not lived the same lives.
Nature, for me, then becomes a matter of experience, a word Rorty didn’t always like, but which his philosophical hero, John Dewey, did. Nature becomes something another of Rorty’s philosophical heroes, William James, spoke of by saying “If you can change your mind, you can change your life” for this thought relies on the belief that there is not merely one way to live a life but potentially as many ways as there are people. Rorty, in his philosophy, reminds us that there is no need to worry about going wrong in this for we will always be never more and never less in touch with nature as reality as we do. What nature allows no one else should feel the need to disallow and the ways that nature causes us to change our minds, which are made to be flexible and to work by changing, are not ways that others should object to if we ourselves become genuinely convinced of them when mixed up in the network of relations that nature quite naturally provides with all its checks and balances. These things, which may well include the objections of others, are all we need to stay ‘grounded’ but, at the same time, they do not bind us to any conventional yet somehow transcendent notion of truth or what constitutes knowledge that may be propagated by use of realist language, this language merely being a form of words or a vocabulary rather than, as it may well claim, being the way that nature talks. Nature doesn’t talk, it is not knowing and it has no truth to dispense. Nature is not an arbiter; it is an environment instead.
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