American Pragmatist Philosopher Richard Rorty and His Impact in the Modern Conception of Philosophy - Term Paper Example

Richard Rorty Introduction “He is arguably the most influential philosopher of our time: a radical American who is against war in Iraq - and against truth, reason and science. Yet his radicalism turns out to be oddly disarming” Simon Blackburn (1) Richard McKay Rorty, American pragmatist philosopher and public intellectual noted for his wide-ranging critique of the modern conception of philosophy as a quasi-scientific enterprise aimed at reaching certainty and objective truth. In politics he has argued against programs of both the left and the right in favor of what he describes as a meliorative and reformist “bourgeois liberalism.” (2).Rortys views are somewhat easier to characterize in negative than in positive terms. In epistemology he opposes foundationalism, the view that all knowledge can be grounded, or justified, in a set of basic statements that do not themselves require justification. According to his “epistemological behaviorism,” Rorty holds that no statement is epistemologically more basic than any other, and no statement is ever justified “finally” but only relative to some circumscribed and contextually determined set of additional statements. In the philosophy of language Rorty rejects the idea that sentences or beliefs are “true” or “false” in any interesting sense other than being useful or successful within a broad social practice. He also opposes representationism, the view that the main function of language is to represent or picture pieces of an objectively existing reality. Finally, in metaphysics he rejects both realism and antirealism, or idealism, as products of mistaken representationalist assumptions about language. A little about Rortys life and works Richard Rorty was born in 1931 in New York City. He graduated from the Chicago of Rudolf Carnap in 1949, and has taught at Princeton, as well as the University of Virginia and Stanford. But he left the cautious world of analytical philosophy to go over to the enemy, thereby perfectly fitting the bill as lord of the dance to the subversives. He is also an example of a phenomenon common in France and Germany, but which exported to America better than to England, namely the public intellectual. In his case, it is a family tradition. Rorty, an only child, is the grandson of Walter Rauschenbusch, one of the founders of Americas social gospel movement, and both his parents were writers and active Trotskyites. "My parents were part of the anti-Stalinist left which centered on John Dewey," Rorty has said. Despite his own hostility to Marxism, he continues to place himself "wholeheartedly on the left." Rortys publications include Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989). (2) His philosophies a. Overview b. Philosophy: Neither Realism nor Antirealism c. Anti-essential Nominalism d. Anti-foundationalist Historicism e. Ethnocentricism f. Philosophy as Metaphor g. Anti-representational Metaphilosophy h. Pragmatic Pluralism i. Solidarities, Poets, and the Jeffersonian Strategy j. Non-reductive Materialism and the Self (4) Overview of his philosophies The overarching theme of Rorty’s writing is a promotion of a thorough-going naturalism. Recognizing the value of the Enlightenment challenge to religious speculation, and its offering of a humanist philosophy in its place, Rorty argues that the Enlightenment program was never completed. It fell short of it goal by keeping one foot in the past. By substituting the notion of Truth as One in place of a monotheistic world view, the Enlightenment reformers repeated the tradition’s error by continuing to seek non-human authority, now in the guise of what Wilfred Sellers called “the Myth of the Given.” Holding that reality has an intrinsic nature, and by advancing the correspondence theory of truth, Enlightenment philosophers turned away from full-blown naturalism, ironically, in service to a scientific objectivity that required a radical separation of the observer from the observed. Rorty’s neopragmatism is meant to ameliorate this perceived shortcoming by rigorously following through on Immanuel Kant’s distinction between causality and justification. Rorty holds that our relation with the environment is purely causal. However, the way in which we describe it—the linguistic tools we employ to cope with the recalcitrance of that environment in an effort to achieve our purposes and desires, as natural creatures in the natural world—determines how we understand that world. Once we are causally prompted to form a belief, justification may take place in a social world where, as Davidson notes, only a belief can justify a belief. In short, Rorty maintains that there can be no norms derived from the natural, but only from the social. This position allows Rorty to reject scientism (the representationalist view that cleaves to the Myth of the Given) while endorsing the development of a fully-naturalized science as an extremely useful tool for prediction and control. It also opens the way for Rorty to advance naturalized democracy with confidence. Instead of seeking some underlying fact about human nature which is essential, a historical, and universalizable, Rorty proposes we seek the justifications that are relevant to a contextually embedded practice. The loss of the unconditionality associated with long-established notions of truth is actually a gain, pragmatically speaking. While truth is an aim that is unachievable due to its definitional ambivalence prior to commitment to action, justification is a recognizable (and contingent) goal that permits practical satisfaction without closing the door on future recalibration in response to inevitable challenges to such justifications. The best way to allow for justification of a belief with no neutral standpoint, Rorty suggests, is to allow competing beliefs to be evaluated on their performance capabilities and not on their ability to ground themselves in universal validity. This leads directly to Rorty’s ethnocentricism.(4) What does he say about Truth Rorty does not believe in certainty or absolute truth, he does not advocate the philosophical pursuit of such things. Instead, he believes that the role of philosophy is to conduct an intellectual “conversation” between contrasting but equally valid forms of intellectual inquiry—including science, literature, politics, religion, and many others—with the aim of achieving mutual understanding and resolving conflicts. This general view is reflected in Rortys political works, which consistently defend traditional left-liberalism and criticize newer forms of “cultural leftism” as well as more conservative positions.(1) Rorty denies the possibility that humanity could one day be united by a common realization of the truth of how we ought to live. Indeed, he accepts that the best we can possibly hope for is a consensus amongst a very large percentage of the population. What matters most is that there is a them opposed to us and that we are open to the possibility of changing our historical, contingent language-game to expand it to include others. Liberalism is the only political philosophy, to Rortys mind, that allows alternative language-games to co-exist side-by-side and thus keep open the possibility of us hearing the unfamiliar noises of others and incorporating them into our world view. Inevitably then, he has drawn the wrath of neo-Marxists in particular from whose ranks come the strongest critics of his political philosophy. However, Rorty has continually rebutted and refuted his enemies and, in public debate, he is a formidable opponent, well worth handing over real money to see and hear. To understand It in true essence we must have knowledge about pragmatism. 1. All human inquiry, thought and belief occurs in language. [In Konstantin Kolenda’s words, "all phenomena are relative to the language in which the are described."] 2. All language is entirely culturally determined. Conclusion: There is no objective human inquiry thought or belief.(3) What is Pragmatism The school of philosophy, dominant in the United States during the first quarter of the 20th century, based on the principle that the usefulness, workability, and practicality of ideas, policies, and proposals are the criteria of their merit. It stresses the priority of action over doctrine, of experience over fixed principles, and it holds that ideas borrow their meanings from their consequences and their truths from their verification. Thus, ideas are essentially instruments and plans of action. Major theses of philosophic Pragmatism During the first quarter of the 20th century, Pragmatism was the most influential philosophy in America, exerting an impact on the study of law, education, political and social theory, art, and religion. Six fundamental theses of this philosophy can be distinguished. It is, however, unlikely that any one thinker would have subscribed to them all; and even on points of agreement,varying interpretations mark the thought and temper of the major Pragmatists. The six theses are: 1. Responsive to Idealism and evolutionary theory, Pragmatists have emphasized the “plastic” nature of reality and the practical function of knowledge as an instrument for adapting to reality and controlling it. Existence is fundamentally concerned with action, which some Pragmatists exalted to an almost metaphysical level. Change being an inevitable condition of life, Pragmatists have called attention to the ways in which change can be directed for individual and social benefit. 2. Pragmatism is a continuation of critical Empiricism in emphasizing the priority of actual experience over fixed principles and a priori reasoning in critical investigation. For James this meant that the Pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action . . . It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against . . . dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth. 3. The pragmatic meaning of an idea, belief, or proposition is said to reside in the distinct class of specific experimental or practical consequences that result from the use, application, or entertainment of the notion. 4. While most philosophers have defined truth in terms of a beliefs “coherence” within a pattern of other beliefs or as the “correspondence” between a proposition and an actual state of affairs, Pragmatism has, in contrast, generally held that truth, like meaning, is to be found in the process of verification. Thus truth is the verification of a proposition, or the successful working of an idea. Crudely, truth is “what works.” 5. Pragmatists have interpreted ideas as instruments and plans of action. In contrast to the conception of ideas as images and copies of impressions or of external objects, Pragmatist theories have emphasized the functional character of ideas: ideas are suggestions and anticipations of possible conduct; they are hypotheses or forecasts of what will result from a given action; they are ways of organizing behavior in the world rather than replicas of the world. Ideas are thus analogous in some respects to tools; they are efficient, useful, and valuable, or not, depending on the role that they play in contributing to the successful direction of behavior. 6. In methodology, Pragmatism is a broad philosophical attitude toward the formation of concepts, hypotheses, and theories and their justification. To Pragmatists mans interpretations of reality are motivated and justified by considerations of efficacy and utility in serving his interests and needs; the molding of language and theorizing are likewise subject to the critical objective of maximum usefulness according to mans various purposes.(2) Major influences on Rorty a. Hegel’s Historicism as Protopragmatism b. Darwin’s Evolution c. Heidegger: Contingency over Certainty d. Dewey’s Pragmatic Democracy e. Davidson on Truth and Meaning(4) Influence on others Richard Rorty is a philosophical hero to some and enemy of philosophy to others. Richard Bernstein has noted that Rorty-bashing has become something of a philosophical sport. Love him or loathe him, you cannot ignore him. There is no doubt that Rorty is one the most influential, controversial, prolific, and widely read philosophers in the world. Unlike many of his contemporaries, and following the example of his own heroes William James and John Dewey, he is a public philosopher writing for a broad audience on a vast range of topics related to social justice and democracy. (2) Conclusion The failure of Rorty’s youthful attempt to synthesize into one vision his identification with the downtrodden together with his search for the "Truth beyond hypothesis" was the making of his career in philosophy and then he proceeded to new heights and founded a new philosophical era and influenced almost everyone. Summarizing his entire view about truth we can conclude by this statement, “Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself” Works Cited (1) Richard Rorty & Herman J. Saatkamp. (1995). Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds. Vanderbilt University Press. (2) Charles B. Guignon & David R. Hiley. (2003). Richard Rorty. Cambridge University Press. (3) Richard Rorty. (1989). Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press. (4) Richard Rorty. (1999). Philosophy and Social Hope. Penguin Read More