Truth and Knowledge: Rorty's Epistemological Behaviorism

Although Rorty insists that we give up representationalism as the modern era's epistemological search for necessary Truth, he recognizes that we do still want an understanding of knowledge and of the authority that inheres in knowledge claims. He therefore offers an alternative: a nonrepesentationalist, pragmatic, “sociological” understanding of knowledge. He emphasizes that our norms for what counts as legitimate inquiry and knowledge are social, and emerge from the historically contingent problem-solving activities of our community of inquirers. Unlike representationalism, this conception of knowledge supports a genuinely anti-authoritarian liberalism because it insists that there are no nonhuman authorities that dictate Truth to us.

As Jeffrey Stout observes, Rorty presents his critique of representationalism in two ways: as “therapy” and as “prophecy,” and the latter term is indeed a felicitous segue to Rorty's vision of liberal utopia.Footnote ³⁰ Following Wittgenstein, Rorty, when in therapeutic mode, seems to suggest that the point of his critique is simply to urge his fellow philosophers to abandon what Dewey referred to as a “brood and nest of dualisms”: reality/appearance, subjectivity/objectivity, realism/idealism, realism/anti-realism, morality/prudence, philosophy/literature, etc. The pragmatic point about these distinctions is that none of them are necessary or need be drawn in any particular way, and that our deployment of them should be evaluated by the consequences that result. The implication of the therapeutic view of Rorty's attack on representationalism is that his critique aims merely to rescue us from linguistic confusion that causes philosophical anxiety. Practically, this therapy “leaves everything as it is”Footnote ³¹; it does not call on us to do anything. We should just relax, ignore irritating and meaningless philosophical impulses, and go about using our ordinary language in our ordinary way. In this vein, Rorty often pens passages like the following: “Pragmatists think that there are two advantages to antiessentialism. The first is that adopting it makes it impossible to formulate a lot of the traditional philosophical problems. The second is that adopting it makes it easier to come to terms with Darwin.”Footnote ³² He also writes that the inspiration he takes from James and Dewey springs from the fact that their “main accomplishments were negative, in that they explain how to slough off a lot of intellectual baggage which we inherited from the Platonic tradition.”Footnote ³³

Such negative or minimalist descriptions of pragmatism, however, do a disservice to Rorty's project (not to mention to those of Dewey and James); they are one-sided and incomplete, and thus misleading. (Again, this helps explain why so many critics miss the full picture). Rorty's minimalist descriptions are unpragmatic because they are inarticulate about the full, practical point of ceasing to use vocabularies of metaphysics. Rather, we must see Rorty's Wittgensteinian therapy as a tactic aimed at ushering in his cultural-political ideal. Stout correctly recognizes this:

When he is properly articulate about his project, Rorty is explicit that “[c]riticisms of representationalist theories of mind and language (of the sort in which I have specialized) remain sterile scholastic exercises until they are tied in with attempts to get rid of the notion of appeal to a nonhuman authority – the common element in the idea that we can appeal to the Divine Will and the idea that we should attempt to represent Reality accurately.”Footnote ³⁵ The point of this anti-authoritarianism is to cultivate the intellectual preconditions, and encourage the pursuit, of his liberal ideal. As Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley remark, Rorty's “[a]ntifoundationalism aims at expanding possibilities for self-description, thus rehumanizing humans by affirming freedom and opening up possibilities through greater tolerance.”Footnote ³⁶

Rorty's critique of representationalism, along with his own proposed sociological understanding of knowledge, are thus integral to achieving his ethico-political ideal. As we have seen, on Rorty's account, representationalist epistemology begins with Descartes, who bequeaths to modern philosophy the picture of knowledge as mental representations – “ideas” until the twentieth-century linguistic turn; linguistic propositions thereafter – that mirror the external world.Footnote ³⁷ Locke contributes to the picture by theorizing that these representations, if they accurately correspond to reality, are caused in our minds when the empirical world stimulates our sensory organs. The problem, of course, is that this understanding of knowledge yields the familiar philosophical bogeymen of modern skepticism and relativism: if all we know are the inner, mental representations, how can we ever be sure that they accurately depict the world outside? We cannot step outside of our heads and check. Furthermore, because these inner representations cannot be checked against anything that is not just one more representation – that is, cannot be checked against the world itself, as it exists not under human description, to ensure veracity – then it seems that one set of representations cannot be shown to be any more true or right than any other set. In the face of these problems, the goal of modern philosophy has been to identify privileged, foundational representations that bear some hallmark of accuracy, from which we can then methodically infer the rest of our knowledge.

The conventional narrative of modern epistemology divides the attempts to solve the philosophical problems of representationalism into two broad, contrasting traditions: empiricism and rationalism. For modern empiricism, the privileged representations must be sensory data or observation reports; for the rationalists, who find the buzz of empirical experience too ephemeral and contingent to constitute a proper, certain foundation, the privileged representations must be a priori concepts that all knowers possess. Kant, the story continues, famously attempts to reconcile these two foundationalist efforts in his transcendental idealism: the rational mind necessarily conceptually formats the incoming sense data, thereby ensuring their uniformity and reliability, though never achieving knowledge of unformatted reality in itself (“an-sich”). Post-Kantian epistemology has been wrestling with how to relate sensible intuitions (the empirical “content”) and mental concepts (the rational “scheme”) ever since. Moreover, Kant's mysterious and inconvenient remainder – the world as it is in itself or Ding-an-sich – despite his elaborate metaphysical assurances, continues to raise the representationalist worries of skepticism and relativism.

What distinguishes Rorty from most of the contributors to the contemporary epistemological debates is that his pragmatic attack on representationalism is consciously driven by his normative agenda. He writes, “I think that putting the issue [of objectivity versus relativism] in such moral and political terms, rather than epistemological or metaphilosophical terms, makes clearer what is at stake. For now the question is not about how to define words like ‘truth’ or ‘rationality’ or ‘knowledge’ or ‘philosophy,’ but about what self-image our society should have of itself.”Footnote ³⁸ Representationalist thinkers, by contrast, conceive of Philosophy as the ultimate, neutral judge of cultural practices because it defines what counts as knowledge. By identifying the universal criteria for knowledge, Philosophy is able to “divide culture up into areas which represent reality well, those which represent it less well, and those which do not represent it at all (despite their pretense of doing so).”Footnote ³⁹ Rorty condemns this traditional conception of Philosophy, which imagines itself as a meta-discipline whose special methods give it access to Truth and thereby renders its practitioners the proper cultural authority above politics and ground-level normative debate. For him, the only source of authority in a liberal culture should be its historically evolving social practices of justification, and their associated norms, which the liberal community develops and revises through ongoing free inquiry. “Free inquiry” itself, of course, is a “social practice of justification,” and thus its own norms that constitute it as a practice are also revised, though not all at once, through its practice.

Rorty's point, naturally, is not that his fellow philosophers (or scientists) harbor secretly authoritarian fantasies or scheme to take over political power and install themselves as philosopher-kings. His concern is rather that their representationalist-essentialist projects encourage the a priori privileging of certain areas of culture – natural science in our era, though it was formerly theology and religion – over others. Thus, one of Rorty's primary fears about representationalism is “scientism”: the tendency, arguably widespread in modern intellectual culture, to believe that only the claims of natural science count as real knowledge, while everything else is mere opinion and up for grabs. One consequence of this automatic promotion of science is the immediate cultural demotion of any field of inquiry, like the subjects of the humanities, which cannot successfully adopt what passes for the “scientific method.” This result, at the very least, puts the study of the humanities at a disadvantage in the competition for funding at our universities. The larger worry that proceeds from this, which I won't elaborate here, is the dark possibility of a society that achieves great technical skill but loses its (liberal) conception of its own humanity.Footnote ⁴⁰ We can appreciate Rorty's humanist concern when even a philosopher who helped inspire his pragmatic critique of representationalism, W. V. Quine, can suggest that “[p]hilosophy of science is philosophy enough.”Footnote ⁴¹ While Rorty is a booster of science and compliments scientists for often providing a superb moral example of liberal virtue and cooperation, he is adamant that science should not be privileged over other disciplines for the reason that it is somehow “closer to truth or reality.”

Rorty claims Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of science as an inspiration for this view. Kuhn's portrayal of scientific progress as historically changing “paradigms” of thought that contain their own, unique criteria for success points up the contingency of science and its methods, revealing its success to be a product of shifting intersubjective agreement rather than the revealing of “objective truth,” a matter of sociology rather than epistemology. In a provocative passage worth quoting at length, Rorty writes:

Rorty's goal, therefore, is to purge our epistemological language of any trace of an a priori conception of a privileged Given, such as the “world” or the “canons of rationality,” that would restrain the outcome of free inquiry. He devises an ingenious description of knowledge, epistemological behaviorism, that avoids both idealism – the implausible view that the world is merely a product of the mind – and metaphysical realism, which insists that there is one correct description of the world that properly captures what “it really is.” On Rorty's account, whether a proposition qualifies as knowledge (i.e., is “true”) depends on whether it is justified in light of our historically contingent social practices of justification, not on whether it is the product of necessarily privileged representations. Rorty is careful, however, not to succumb to the pragmatist temptation to conflate justification with truth, since he does not want to say that whatever is justified is true. After all, truth is eternal and absolute, while justification is always relative to an audience and their temporally evolving practices. Rorty instead insists that the only way that we can correctly apply the adjective “true” to a proposition depends on whether we think the proposition is justified; justification is our only indicator of truth (i.e., to the use of the word “truth”).Footnote ⁴³ This is why we should forgo efforts to philosophically define “Truth” or identify a necessary criterion for it that holds in all contexts and instead focus on whether our practices of justification are, in the broadest sense, satisfying our ever-morphing needs. As Rorty puts it,

Indeed, even when we contemplate the possibility of a proposition being true but not justified, what we mean is that the proposition is not justified to the relevant audience, not that it is never justified to anyone at all. To even contemplate a proposition as being “true,” it must be seen as justified, for example, to us. For instance, we can say that the proposition, “women should be allowed to vote,” was unjustified (for most people, according to their standards of justification) in the early nineteenth century. But it is justified to us in the early twenty-first century, which is why we call it “true.” The idea that there could be propositions that are true but are never justified, ever, is something with which a pragmatist does not concern himself. If a proposition cannot be justified, then, by definition, there are no good reasons to accept it and act on it. To insist that it, despite being unjustified, is nevertheless “true” is either a failure to give reasons for believing it or an implication that reasons shall be forthcoming.Footnote ⁴⁵

Justification, in Rorty's view, is a Wittgensteinian language game that takes place within a communally constituted web of propositions with inferential connections. Whether a claim is justified depends on whether it fits coherently into this web, which is why Rorty (with Davidson) insists that only a belief can justify another belief.Footnote ⁴⁶ Successful inquiry, on this view, is the fruitful “reweaving of beliefs rather than discovering the [essential] natures of objects.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Rorty's understanding of knowledge is thus “coherentist,” to be contrasted with the representationalist “correspondence” theories he repudiates. Coherence theories, however, face an obvious objection: doesn't this inferentially constructed, “coherent-but-non-corresponding web” leave beliefs, as John McDowell puts it, “spinning in a void,” out of contact with the world, which is what they are supposed to be about?Footnote ⁴⁸ Indeed, Rorty is commonly accused of being a “linguistic idealist” who implausibly holds that the world for us is constructed by language – “everything is text” – and is therefore simply what we decide to say it is. The apparent lack of constraint on belief implied by this view is ultimately what exercises most of Rorty's philosophical critics. Rorty's position, however, is much more nuanced than this.

Following Davidson, he responds to the accusation of “linguistic idealism” by insisting that we are always in causal contact with brute, nonhuman reality: because we become “knowers” by learning a language, our interactions with the world cause us to have noninferential beliefs, which can then play a role in the inferentialist, social game of justification.Footnote ⁴⁹ For example, the pattern of light from the TV screen hits my retina, which sends signals that are processed by my nervous system, which causes me, because of the linguistic “programming” I have gained as a member of sports-watching America, to acquire the (depressing) belief that the Oakland Raiders have once again missed the NFL playoffs. I can then tell others, who may challenge this proposition, and I can respond that I saw the score reported on ESPN SportsCenter (which presumes that we all share a belief that this a generally reliable source for this sort of information). Notice, however, that the sensory experience itself plays no justificatory role; only the propositional belief, which the sensory episode noninferentially causes me to have, plays this role.

Rorty thus follows Sellars in distinguishing between the “space of causation” and the “space of reasons”: “The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.”Footnote ⁵⁰ To be a knower is to be engaged in a linguistic practice of reason-giving; it is the ability to make claims, not the ability to have mental episodes (although Rorty and Sellars do not doubt that we do have such episodes or that they can cause us to hold beliefs and make noninferential claims). Robert Brandom elaborates:

Thus, while a parrot can be trained to discriminate red objects and squawk “Red!” when presented with such objects, it cannot take up a normative position in the “space of reasons” (or practice of justification); it cannot give reasons for why it squawks “Red!” When, however, I say, “The car is red,” you can ask, “Why?” and then I can cite reasons (other propositions) for my assertion: for example, “Because I can see it,” or “Because Jones told me,” or “Because that's what the ad says.” As Rorty puts it, “there is no such thing as justification which is not a relation between propositions.”Footnote ⁵² “What determines beliefs, then, is not [solely] the physical event, but the socially constructed, institutionalized vocabulary that provides the ‘space of reasons’ in which causal stimuli come to have propositional form and a place in a set of inferential relations.”Footnote ⁵³ To ask, “Sure, but how do you really know the car is red?”, beyond our practices of justification, is to make the mistake of retaining the Myth of the Given, and, hence, the representationalist view of knowledge, which brings along its assorted difficulties of skepticism, relativism, subjectivism/solipsism (because we are each trapped behind our individual “veil of ideas”), and nihilism. This is why, on Wittgenstein's account, after I have exhaustively explained to you why I believe the car is red, I am finally reduced to the answer: “Because I know English,” which is to assert, in other words, “Because I am correctly playing the linguistic game of justification.”Footnote ⁵⁴

This neo-Kantian distinction between the space of causation and the space of reasons, however, avoids the bugaboo of the mysterious Ding-an-sich: a way that the world is that, by definition, forever escapes description. Rorty and Davidson ask us to drop the distinction between mental concepts and sensible intuitions or, as they label it, the “scheme-content distinction,” that haunts modern empiricism: “the distinction between determinate realities and a set of concepts or words which may or may not be ‘adequate’ to them.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The scheme-content distinction leads to skepticism and relativism because it produces worries about whether our schemes accurately disclose “determinate reality.” Instead, we should see ourselves as “programmed” with a vocabulary of beliefs through our socialization into a historically contingent, communal language game.Footnote ⁵⁶ Because we pragmatically take ourselves to be actors immersed in the world, we take these beliefs to be mostly true. That is to say, the causal phenomena that constitute the world produce beliefs that are mostly correct because of what Davidson calls the “veridical nature of belief”: our beliefs must be mostly true because of the way they are formed – through coping with the world.Footnote ⁵⁷ A person who adhered to a set of beliefs that was mostly false would not last long; indeed, it might not even make sense to suppose that such a person could exist in our world, for how would she ever acquire a thoroughly false set of beliefs? If beliefs are, as Peirce tells us, “habits of action” then, holistically speaking, they must generally get the world right.

The pragmatist is unmoved by Cartesian “brain-in-a-vat” scenarios that present the skeptical challenge that all of our beliefs could be false because, as in the movie The Martrix, our “reality” is completely an illusion. What the pragmatist cares about is how well we are coping with the “illusionary” reality; if we are coping reasonably well, then we are practically getting our reality right, whether it is “illusionary” from some perspective or not. Pragmatists make a lawyer's “relevance objection” to Cartesian skeptics: How does the possibility that we are “brains-in-a-vat” change or mean anything for our practices?

This does not mean, of course, that some of our beliefs cannot be wrong (in terms of other beliefs that we have or come to have) or, equally important, that different individuals and communities cannot have serious disagreements. It is rather that most of our beliefs are true and that we thus mostly agree with each other. Two persons from two radically different cultures will still agree, for instance, that rocks are hard, the sun is bright, sometimes it rains, and so on. Nevertheless, they may still end up in mortal combat over whether one must bow to another to show proper respect, or whether prayers must be said after a lightning strike. But notice that our two combatants can only know what they disagree about on a wide background of agreement, which enables them to see one another as purposeful agents.Footnote ⁵⁸

While coping with the causal world gives rise to our language games, the world does not insist that we interpret its causal phenomena in a particular way and thus adopt a particular language game to cope with it.Footnote ⁵⁹ This is why we end up with cultural and ethical pluralism, which include disparate notions of “rationality” and “common sense.” As Rorty puts it,

“Better” in the above sentence means “better tout court,” without reference to particular purposes. Clearly, once we take into account a particular purpose, then one language game might be superior to another in light of that purpose. If we want to put a satellite into orbit, the Newtonian vocabulary will be superior to Aristotle's; if we seek spiritual sustenance in an idiosyncratic, Romantic interpretation of Christianity, we are likely better off looking to Blake than to Dryden. As Dewey insists, means and ends are perpetually up for reevaluation in relation to each other. Rorty exhorts us to keep the process of articulating this reevaluation going so that we avoid taking for granted our instruments and goals, and the relationship between them. We must avoid reifying or “ontologizing” our means and ends lest they become hindrances to achieving other, perhaps new, ends.

Thus, while we cannot be more arbitrary than the causal pressures of the world will let us be, “[t]hese pressures will be described in different ways at different times and for different purposes.”Footnote ⁶¹ This is what Rorty's pragmatic, compatibilist conceptions of freedom and ethical pluralism amount to: the recognition that our language games are, strictly speaking, optional, depending on what ends we have, and our ends are plural and frequently change through time. It is this insistence that we regard different vocabularies – the vocabulary of natural science, or of poetry – as tools for different ends that prevents Rorty's understanding of knowledge from falling prey to reductionism: the idea that we can necessarily better explain one vocabulary in terms of another, epistemologically privileged vocabulary.Footnote ⁶² For example, although the mind might theoretically be described, on Rorty's naturalist understanding, in purely causal terms by an ideal physical science, that does not mean that the uniquely correct way to describe the emotion of love is to say that it is merely a potent cocktail of brain chemistry. It is that, but love is also usefully and, in many contexts, more meaningfully described poetically as being “like a red, red rose.” There is no essence of “mind” or “love” to get hold of; their meanings all depend on our desires and practices.

Rorty tells us, “there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones – no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow-inquirers.”Footnote ⁶³ These “retail constraints” are practical and contingent, and thus their usefulness can always be challenged and new constraints proposed. Adopting this anti-authoritarian position, Rorty hopes, will help complete the humanistic secularization of the modern world, and thereby cultivate the sort of pragmatic, experimental liberal culture that Rorty hopes for.

Epistemological Behaviorism, Fallibilism, and the Liberal Virtues

Rorty suggests that we conceive of minds as “webs of beliefs and desires, of sentential attitudes.”Footnote ⁶⁴ These linguistically constituted webs come into existence as members of a community, which creates and initiates individual minds as participants in a normative practice of justification, of giving and asking for reasons. Language, and the practices of justification that are central to it, evolves as a particularly useful, extremely complex tool that helps us clever apes better cope with the world. In this way, Rorty reconciles the mind with Darwinian naturalism; there is no need for Cartesian dualism that divides reality into two metaphysically unique but mysteriously related substances: mind and matter. There is, consequently, no need for a nonempirical discipline – philosophy or metaphysics – that tries to discover the nonphysical essence of the mind. Rorty's approach also makes basic our social nature: the individual mind is a necessarily a social product of (some) linguistic community. Following Dewey in this communitarian insistence, Rorty's liberalism thereby evades any Sandelian charges of trading on assumptions of “unencumbered selves.”

These “mind-language webs” interact with the nonhuman world and each other, which induces them to “reweave” their structures by adopting new beliefs and desires and dropping other ones (we often call this process “learning,” though reweaving occurs when one misperceives or is deceived as well). The difference between interactions with the nonhuman world and with fellow language speakers is that the former does not present us with propositions; it does not speak to us. It can, again, noninferentially cause me to adopt a proposition into the web that is my mind: if I see that it is raining outside, I will likely be induced to believe that it is raining and thus assert to you, “It's raining.” From this proposition, you infer that you should take an umbrella, because you do not want to get wet, and so forth. But notice that one could infer any number of “truths” from the proposition depending on the language game or “form of life” in which one is a participant. One might infer that we should get the laundry in, or go hunting for frogs, or ambush the neighbors because the rain will mute our approach, or rush outside to celebrate and pray because the crops needed rain, and so on. How we conceive of and react to any empirical sensation depends on the language game we are playing. (As a participant of one sort of game, I may quickly withdraw my hand from a hot coal; as the participant of another, I may continue to grasp it through the pain in order to pass a test of manhood. The mistake is to think that one reaction is somehow “more natural” or justified than the other, simpliciter, without reference to the language game.) Likewise, obviously, our language games depend on how the world is because they evolved as part of it, enabling us to cope with it linguistically.

The mistake of empiricism is to assume that we should be able to reach relevant agreement with each other because we are “experiencing the same thing”: the empirical world that is the same in all respects for everyone, the “Given.” This assumes a “real” or “authentic” core of sensation that gives us rock-bottom, undeniable truths, and that all other inferences from sensory experience beyond this core are just the variable window-dressings of culture. Scientistic empiricists go further and insist that the inferences drawn by the practices of modern science are not mere window-dressing, but are universally valid and should be accepted by all because they are based on empirical experience in a purer, more direct way than nonscientific propositions are. The pragmatist responds, however, that whether the inferences of science should be accepted depends on what one or one's community wants to do. To be sure, the inferences of modern science (as long as they hold up in the face of challenges) have enhanced our ability to predict and control the natural world, but prediction and control may not be the primary purpose of a set of beliefs. The purpose may be entertainment, or increasing communal harmony, or contemplation of the afterlife, or whatever else. The scientist's explanation of a lightning strike as involving ions in the atmosphere is in no way more “basic” than the description of it as an expression of Zeus’ wrath. The fact that both the scientist's and the ancient Greek's differing descriptions of the strike overlap, in that they agree that it was “bright” and “hot” and “loud,” does nothing to resolve the differences between the further inferences they respectively draw from the empirical sensation. The world does not demand that we adopt the vocabulary of modern science rather than the vocabulary of ancient Greek religion, though our purposes might. Purposes must be juggled against the “rightness” of any description of the world.

Rorty's approach to knowledge thus assumes that we all live in the same world, and thereby avoids the hyperbole of Kuhn's suggestion that people operating in different scientific paradigms live in “different worlds.” Further, as we have seen, this means that we mostly share the same beliefs about it. But because different individuals and groups have different purposes, different sets of descriptions of the world are more or less helpful to us as we pursue those varying purposes. The mistake of the rationalists is to assume that there is a necessary, a priori meta-vocabulary or cognitive faculty, usually labeled “Reason,” that enables us to definitively judge all other vocabularies and neutrally resolve conflicts between them.

Rorty's problem with philosophical theories of truth and the metaphysical realists’ insistence that inquiry must aim at “getting the world right” regardless of our variable purposes is that these approaches to knowledge run the risk of shutting down inquiry and suppressing liberal experimentation and pluralism. Truth is an absolute notion: a true proposition can never be false. Rorty is not interested in identifying criteria of truth, with the absolutism they would entail. Rather, his position is that liberal culture and politics will “go better” if we are fallibilistic and have the ability, produced by liberal education, to entertain the possibility that our deepest beliefs could be problematic in some way and could be other than what they are. We can cash out “go better” as meaning, for example, more humane, more creative, more stimulating, more progressive than past eras, and so forth, though each of these concepts is up for deliberative grabs as well.

Rorty believes we will be more fallibilistic if we focus on our social practices of justification, which we recognize as historically contingent, and let truth alone. We continue to use the words “true” and “truth,” but preferably in what Rorty calls a “cautionary” way, as when we say, “Your arguments satisfy all our contemporary norms and standards of justification, and therefore I can presently think of nothing to say against your claim, but still, what you say might not be true.”Footnote ⁶⁵ This is an ordinary way to use these concepts that also emphasizes our fallibilism with regard to any particular claim. Rorty continues, “I take this cautionary use to be a gesture toward future generations – toward the ‘better us’ to whom the contradictory of what now seems unobjectionable may have come, via appropriate means, to seem better.”Footnote ⁶⁶

For Rorty's critics, however, this fails to do justice to the idea of serious inquiry and its necessary goal of objective Truth. One way to look at the fundamental disagreement between Rorty and his critics is to understand it as a dispute over what properly constrains our beliefs and actions. It is a dispute over the nature and identification of authority. Rorty's critics think that he goes too far in attributing the authority for our claims of knowledge to the admittedly contingent, communal practices of justification. The basic thrust of their attacks is, naturally, that the practices of justification of any community can be mistaken. Ergo, a proposition can be maximally justified according to those practices and yet still be false. There must be something beyond our practices of justification – “Truth” – that determines the correct constraints that apply to our beliefs and actions. Without these constraints, we have epistemic anarchy and, accordingly, ethical and political conflict with no standards of just resolution.

Conceiving of these constraints as contingent and practice-based, as opposed to necessary and metaphysical, does encourage us to be ironic about them, and to scrutinize them and subject them to challenge. Because Rorty wants to strip our most cherished norms of their traditional rhetorical armor, they can seem relatively more vulnerable to modification. The Right worries that this leads to hubristic attacks on time-worn, traditional truths (whether in politics, religion, science, or philosophy); the Left is concerned that if their ideals of liberation are not warranted by something greater than historical practices, the ideals will be robbed of their revolutionary mandate that calls us to break free of our current practices. But the pragmatic disposition does not lead to wholesale skepticism or nihilism about ideals (whether they are conservative or Leftist), but leads rather to Hume's “mitigated or moderate skepticism,” which is nondogmatic and open to ethical experimentation.

In response to John Searle's accusation that this position amounts to a misguided rejection of the “Western Rationalistic Tradition,” Rorty writes:

The obvious response to this is: But where are these allegedly intersubjective lines of constraint drawn? “Muddling through to some sort of compromise” is theoretically thin gruel; we want theory that gives us answers and points to a course of action. From the vantage point of traditional Philosophy, this pragmatism has simply (cravenly?) abandoned the epistemological enterprise at the heart of human existence. How do we determine whether an experiment is “bad,” and must be restrained, or “good” and should thus be tolerated or encouraged? As we have seen, Rorty insists that there is no algorithm or philosophical method for identifying necessary criteria for making this determination. We simply have to engage in a lot of adhockery and creative justification in the different contexts of the challenges we face. Moreover, the thrust of Rorty's work as a whole suggests that liberally educated and socialized persons, who exhibit the liberal virtues, are the best bet for making the correct determinations over time. Rorty's pragmatism thus makes him a type of “virtue epistemologist,” and pragmatically there need be no distinction between the intellectual/epistemic virtues and the ethico-political liberal virtues.Footnote ⁶⁸ It is the liberal virtues that keep us responsible and keep our inquiries and experiments within the realm of liberal justification. But Rorty is clear that there are no guarantees; he simply believes that it's our best chance for creating a free and just civilization, however it might evolve.

Indeed, by urging us to self-consciously conceive of our most deeply held norms as contingent products of history, Rorty's work induces us to do two things: (1) to study the historical development of those norms to better appreciate their contingency and better evaluate them in light of our other (contingent) norms and goals; and (2) be more articulate in our justification (or rejection) of those norms. If we accept Rorty's views, it will no longer be acceptable to think that saying that something is “true,” or “more rational,” or “natural” is a coup de grâce in the game of justification. We should see these adjectives as terms of approbation that demand further articulation of the propositions to which we apply them; they are not essential conversation-enders.

Critics: Is Rorty an Irresponsible Relativist?

Rorty's oeuvre has been criticized by literally hundreds of scholars and intellectuals; summarizing and addressing all of these criticisms here is thus an impossible task. What I will try to do in this section and the next is defend Rorty against some of the most representative and serious critiques. Of particular interest are those penned by thinkers who are mostly sympathetic to Rorty's work and who consider themselves part of the American pragmatist tradition. This group includes prominent friends and interlocutors of Rorty, such as Hilary Putnam, Jeffrey Stout, and Gary Gutting. But as an entrée into the cottage industry of Rorty criticism, I will rely on the avowedly anti-pragmatism philosopher, Thomas Nagel.

Nagel simplifies our task by identifying two predominant charges against Rorty's sociological description of knowledge: relativism and inconsistency.Footnote ⁶⁹ And, indeed, the latter arguably flows from the former: if Rorty is a relativist, then he is inconsistent when he makes claims for the superiority of liberalism over nonliberalism, modern science over Aristotelian science, and so on, because a relativist cannot consistently make claims of superiority. Stemming from these two fundamental criticisms, different critics emphasize different aspects of the perceived failure of Rorty's project.

Putnam, for example, who is a pragmatist thinker himself, has pressed the charge of relativism against Rorty for decades, and his critique has been favorably cited by such philosophical lights as Bernard Williams and Ronald Dworkin.Footnote ⁷⁰ Like many other critics, Putnam takes issue with what he sees as Rorty's reduction of objectivity to mere solidarity with one's epistemic community and their norms of justification.Footnote ⁷¹ Critics often render this alleged position of Rorty as the pithy claim that “[t]ruth is whatever our peers will let us get away with saying.” This is actually a paraphrase of a passage in PMN in which Rorty addresses the question: “Can we treat the study of ‘the nature of human knowledge’ just as the study of certain ways in which human beings interact [i.e., sociologically], or does it require an ontological foundation (involving some specifically philosophical way of describing human beings)?” The first alternative is, of course, the pragmatic one that Rorty endorses.

Given Rorty's later insistence that “truth” is indefinable, this does appear to be a misstep if read to imply that what is true is simply “what our peers will let us get away with saying,” or even that truth is Dewey's “warranted assertability.” Nevertheless, Rorty has claimed ad nauseum in subsequent work that he holds Davidson's position that, “[W]e should not say that truth is correspondence, coherence, warranted assertability, what is accepted in the conversation of the right people, what science will end up maintaining, what explains the convergence on single theories in science, or the convergence of our ordinary beliefs.”Footnote ⁷³ Critics who continue to associate Rorty with the bald claim that truth is simply whatever one's peers let one get away with saying thus attack a straw man. Moreover, it is not clear that this passage, which dogs Rorty in so many critiques of him, even asserts what his critics allege. If we interpret it a bit more generously, we can understand this early statement as merely an expression of Rorty's emphasis on the social nature of justification (which should leave absolute truth aside). After all, the statement is couched primarily as a criticism of the representationalist conception of truth rather than as a positive identification of the nature of truth.

Although Rorty clarified his position in the 1980s as he further embraced Davidson, Putnam remains dissatisfied. He parses Rorty's conception of knowledge as possessing two problematic aspects: a contextualist aspect and a reformist aspect.Footnote ⁷⁴ The contextualist aspect is Rorty's “sociological view of warrant,” which holds that we must look to our peers to determine whether a proposition is justified. Putnam insists that this aspect leaves Rorty's conception of knowledge unable to account for the epistemic possibility that an individual can be warranted in asserting a proposition that is nevertheless rejected as unjustified by his peers (using their current standards of justification). This possibility, Putnam insists, is implicit in the very concepts of “warrant” and “justification.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Indeed, even the Relativist accepts this because she recognizes that most of her peers disagree with her relativism, and yet she argues for it nevertheless because she believes it to be justified (i.e., independently of what her peers believe).

Rorty responds that the status of a proposition as being justified is always relative to some (potential) audience.Footnote ⁷⁶ As we have seen, it makes no pragmatic sense to concern ourselves with the possibility of propositions that will never be accepted as justified by any audience but which are nevertheless true. Indeed, the idea of such propositions seems to assume something that both Rorty and Putnam famously reject: a “God's-eye view” that sees truths that will never be known by any non-divine beings. Part of the confusion here comes from the obvious fact that we can indeed easily imagine the lone, persecuted dissenter who is right about a proposition that her epistemic community nearly unanimously and myopically rejects as false. Our favorite actual examples of this sort of epistemic situation include many of our most cherished historical heroes, who courageously stand up against wrongheaded conventional wisdom in the name of “Truth.” But note that it is not the case that such dissenters are justified, simpliciter, in spite of not being justified to their contemporaries. They are justified to us. Using our currently held standards of justification, we recognize them as right and their peers as wrong, otherwise the example does not work for us, the relevant audience for the example. Rorty's picture of warrant thus does allow for the possibility of, as he puts it, the “unhonored prophet of some social or intellectual revolution whose time has not yet come.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Moreover, of course, we (or our successors) may come to the conclusion in the future that we and the dissenter are wrong, and that the conventional wisdom of the dissenter's original community was actually right all along.

This response disarms two other sophisticated critics of Rorty: John McDowell and Gary Gutting. McDowell attacks Rorty by insisting that

According to McDowell, without this distinction between having justified to one's peers that X occurred, on the one hand, and whether X actually did, in fact, occur, on the other, “there would be no ground for conceiving of one's activity as making claims about, say, whether or not cold fusion has occurred, as opposed to achieving unison with one's fellows in some perhaps purely decorative activity on a level with a kind of dancing.…[Rorty] makes a mystery of how we manage to direct our thought and speech as it were past the endorsement of our fellows and to the facts themselves.”Footnote ⁷⁹ McDowell's fear, shared by Putnam and others, is that Rorty's rhetorical substitution of “solidarity” for “objectivity” as the aim of inquiry encourages inquirers to simply try to please their audiences rather than to actually discover how the world is. This renders inquiry both disingenuous and dangerous. Indeed, many critics argue that because discovering the one, true nature of the world is the point of serious inquiry, whether scientific, historical, artistic, or moral, these activities lose their motivation if Rorty's view is accepted. Nagel, for instance, dramatically insists that “[n]o basic science could be done by anyone who really took up Rorty's ironic historicism as an attitude to his own activities.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Apparently for Nagel, mere problem-solving and increased ability to practically predict and control nature is not be enough to sustain science. Human beings fall from the status of serious investigators of truth to merely frivolous, unctuous flatterers who produce sweet illusions for each other, to our ultimate detriment when reality inevitably comes crashing in on us.

Rorty concedes to McDowell that “Did X happen?” does not have the same meaning as the question, “Can saying, ‘X happened,’ pass muster in the current practice?” But he insists that this difference in meaning does not mean that there are two different norms implicated: if you are trying to determine if X happened, you are unavoidably applying (but also modifying) the current norms of your epistemic community. Rorty writes, “I see no norm relevant to assertability save those set by one or another social practice – either current practice or some possible better alternative. So where McDowell sees a distinction between two questions – ‘to whom?’ and ‘in light of what?’ – I see a distinction between two answers to the question ‘to whom?’. The answer may be ‘current practitioners’ or ‘some other, better informed or more enlightened practitioners.’”Footnote ⁸¹

To McDowell's recitation of Putnam's argument that “norms of inquiry transcend consensus” Rorty can reply that, as long as “transcend” means “evolve intelligibly beyond current social practice to a conceivable future social practice,” then he can agree. Indeed, our practices of inquiry are invariably rife with tensions that can be exploited to develop the practice in one direction or another (precedents in common law legal cases are an instructive example of how such a process works). The problem comes when “transcend” means something more than the temporal development of social practices and instead implies “facts” or a “state of affairs” that are supposed to be criteria of “rightness” independent of our practices, however these practices develop. Rorty insists, “If there is anything distinctive about pragmatism it is that it substitutes the notion of a better human future for the notions of ‘reality,’ ‘reason’ and ‘nature.’”Footnote ⁸²

Despite his protest that claims based on “the facts” do not need to presume an audience, however, McDowell's cold fusion example still assumes an audience that judges, using its current epistemic norms, whether or not it has indeed occurred “in light of the facts.” This is because the claim is made according to a practice of justification, and there is no practice without an implied audience that developed it. Let's remove this audience and try to imagine a sole nuclear physicist who claims to have achieved cold fusion simply “in light of the facts.” He presents all of his evidence and arguments to his peers, and they determine, sadly, that he has failed to achieve cold fusion. Might he still have actually achieved it, even though no audience, including us, ever has this fact justified to it? We can never know (since knowing assumes that it is justified to us), and therefore it cannot practically matter to us (or to anyone, since it is never justified to anyone); we cannot act on premises that we do not accept. We cannot entertain the possibility of doing so, because if we do, we are accepting, at least hypothetically, what we have said we do not accept (i.e., that cold fusion has been achieved).

Moreover, it is hard to see Rorty's position as recommending the mere deceitful, manipulative pleasing of one's audience as the goal of inquiry (given the hackles he raises among his readers, certainly he cannot be accused of simply trying to please his audience!). Inquiry is still meaningful in Rorty's view because we have (discursive) knowledge of the world only insofar as we believe that knowledge to be justified. While his critics argue, for example, that scientists must aim at discovering the world regardless of whether they can justify their findings to anyone, Rorty's point is that, since designating something a “discovery” is a matter of what can be justified, when scientists practice science, they are (seriously and sincerely) applying currently accepted norms, even as they are modifying those norms and developing new ones within the practice. As Brandom says, every attempt at justification changes our practices (even if normally only at the margins), just as every use of a concept develops its content and, hence, changes it.Footnote ⁸³ Thus, in a sense, every new claim is a challenge to our current practices, although the degree of challenge exists on the Kuhnian continuum from “normal discourse,” implying very little change, to “revolutionary discourse,” implying large changes. Insofar as we are stably committed to our current practices, we cannot help but be resistant to revolutionary claims that radically challenge those practices (as when the lone physicist cannot convince us that he has achieved cold fusion, though maybe a future audience, one that even we would recognize as better informed, will believe him). This process of justification is thus more than a merely “decorative activity.” It is the struggle to apply and develop our norms of justification in light of further causal interaction with the world and linguistic interaction with each other. There is no reason to think that Rorty's account of inquiry is somehow frivolous, and no reason to think that it fails to be “world-directed.” The world and its causality are inescapable for inquirers; Rorty's point is, however, that inquirers should not treat it as an authority that impresses upon us one correct description of it, regardless of the language game we are playing (as empiricism would suggest). If we conceive of inquiry as a matter of applying socially created, contingent norms, the ultimate point of which is to better fulfill human needs, we will be more creative and dynamic as we engage in inquiry to address our problems.

Gary Gutting also thinks that Rorty is guilty of confusing consensus (just getting one's peers to agree with one) and justification (making well-founded claims about the world).Footnote ⁸⁴ His criticism, however, is more subtle and sympathetic than McDowell's because he agrees with Rorty that our norms of justification are based on nothing more than historically contingent, intersubjective consensus. In other words, he appears to share Rorty's emphasis on social practice for knowledge claims, as opposed to McDowell's emphasis on “answerability to the world,” which raises concerns of authoritarianism for Rorty. Nevertheless, Gutting thinks that Rorty's account of justification too often suggests that beliefs are justified only to the extent that one's community agrees on them. Gutting protests that “[i]t is quite possible for a single individual to be in accord with a community's norms when the rest of the community is not. For example, I could be the only person who pronounces my name correctly or the only person who knows that the twenty-first century does not begin until 2001.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Rorty can respond that one could be right about these things and the community wrong, but only if the community (or a different community that agrees with one's presently idiosyncratic interpretation of the norms) comes round to agreeing that one is right; one can only be right in light of some social practice of justification.

Indeed, Gutting's two examples are telling, perhaps because they do not invoke the “hard, scientific fact” that analytic philosophers (like McDowell) tend to favor in their examples. Can't we imagine a community evolving, or even deciding outright, to switch its norm about when the century started, for example, from 2001 to 2000 (and likewise for all other centuries, perhaps excepting the first)? After all, it would not appear to require much of a shift in practices; indeed, Gutting uses the example, presumably, because lots of people do forget this consequence of our current calendrical norms, even though nothing of value really turns on the mistake (potential computer issues, like Y2K, aside). Gutting's example of the pronunciation of one's name also illustrates how social authority determines what counts as knowledge: does one's community assume that each individual has the authority to determine how his or her name is pronounced, or do one's fellows determine this, as might be the case in a community where everyone bears one of a few traditional names with standardized pronunciations? If the latter, then arguably Gutting's example fails on its own terms: in such communities, one cannot be the only one who knows how to pronounce one's name, and has no authority to correct others who pronounce it the consensus way. Both of these examples indicate how flexible and contingent our norms of justification can be, and thus they actually support Rorty's position against Gutting's critique.

Gutting concedes such possibilities, and yet pushes back against what he takes to be Rorty's insouciance about the stubbornness of many of our norms. For Gutting, norm change is just too easy on Rorty's view. Gutting writes:

Gutting's charge of “decisionism” is widely shared among Rorty's critics, and it forms the basis of accusations that Rorty is frivolous about knowledge claims. Nagel, summing up the reaction of many philosophers to Rorty on this point, writes that

Gutting invites Rorty to unequivocally renounce his conflation of voluntary consensus and justification, and the decisionism that stems from it, and embrace what Gutting calls “humdrum realism.” Adopting this view means accepting our commonsense understanding of the world: “[T]his baseline knowledge of the world is simply a matter of knowing certain commonplaces, not of having a theoretical account of this knowledge.…We can and must subscribe to all the commonplaces: we know truths, many truths are about the world, such truths tell us the way the world is, and so on.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Gutting believes that if Rorty would consistently adhere to a humdrum realism (as he does when he is on his best behavior), he would save himself from some of his excesses.

I think we can make two replies on Rorty's behalf to the charge that he espouses a “wildly implausible decisionism.” The first is that Rorty has explicitly rejected such a view and agrees wholeheartedly with Gutting (and Dewey and Davidson) that we start from a baseline of working knowledge comprised of beliefs that we currently have no reason to doubt. Indeed, this approach to knowledge is integral to classical pragmatism's rejection of Cartesian skepticism, which is why Rorty embraces it. Gutting, of course, recognizes this, but finds too many offensive sentences in Rorty's work that appear to blow past this commonsense, nonphilosophical realism and flirt with the irresponsible views about truth and knowledge that Rorty's harsher critics attribute to him. For instance, Gutting finds deep fault with Rorty's decisionistic line in PMN that Copernican theory eventually won out over the Church's objections because of “the Enlightenment's decision that Christianity was mostly just priestcraft.”Footnote ⁸⁹ But is it fair to assume that Rorty's position is that an anthropomorphized “Enlightenment” literally, at one point, chose to accept Copernican theory? Or is it more reasonable to chalk this rather blatant historical caricature up to some provocative rhetoric? Gutting would probably agree that it is “just rhetoric” but insist that Rorty should not be so “insouciant” in his discussions of such important things, like the rise of modern science and the secular worldview.Footnote ⁹⁰ And indeed, Rorty has issued a mea culpa for a “half-erased decisionism” in PMN, which he admits can still be found in some of his later writings.Footnote ⁹¹

Nevertheless, to his critics’ dismay, Rorty never recanted his controversial insistence that our vocabularies are, in some sense, “optional.” Moreover, critics do not find his later writings any more reasonable on these issues and thus continue to accuse him of decisionism. Hence, Rorty's second reply to the accusation of decisionism is that he is purposely using provocative rhetoric to jar us out of old ways of thinking, recognize the contingency of our current norms, and challenge us to be more experimentalist. Stealing that phrase of Dewey's of which he is particularly fond, Rorty reiterates that “the task of philosophy is to break the crust of convention.”Footnote ⁹² Contra Nagel, however, Rorty does not believe that we can or should willy-nilly choose what to believe, and he quite often, like all of us, finds himself compelled by evidence and argument to adopt or reject beliefs. In order for a mind to exist at all, the web of beliefs that constitute it must have a certain degree of coherence. Rorty writes that “our minds are constrained (and in part constructed) by the need to tie our beliefs and desires together into a reasonably perspicuous whole. That is why we cannot ‘will to believe’ – believe what we like, regardless of what else we believe.”Footnote ⁹³ This is why he concludes: “We Western liberal intellectuals should accept the fact that we have to start from where we are, and that this means that there are lots of views which we simply cannot take seriously.”Footnote ⁹⁴

Nevertheless, he insists that we must keep in mind that we are fallible and that our norms of justification, which are simply beliefs themselves, are contingent and could be otherwise. Rorty's specific response to Gutting can be that “modest fallibilism” is indeed normally the virtuous disposition of a citizen in a well-working liberal society (or scientific community), but that we must remain aware that what is sometimes called for is a more revolutionary fervor that enables us to challenge Gutting's “commonplace truths” (which, as we know, in the past have included a parade of benighted propositions: women are less rational than men, Jews cannot be trusted, the world is made up of the four basic elements, and so forth). Indeed, while Rorty is adamantly against political revolution in our contemporary developed democracies (though adamantly for piecemeal political reform), he welcomes radical challenges to common sense in the arts, religion, lifestyle choices, and so on – that is to say, in the private realm of liberal society. While Rorty generally accepts Gutting's pragmatic, humdrum realism, it is rhetorically problematic: “humdrum” fails to capture the cultural dynamism that Rorty envisions for liberal utopia; rather, it sounds mired in the crust of convention. “Humdrum” seems to overemphasize the normal discourse pole of Kuhn's continuum at the expense of revolutionary discourse. And for Rorty, this “rhetoric matters, especially if one sees, as I do, the pragmatist tradition not just as clearing up little messes left behind by the great dead philosophers, but as contributing to a world-historical change in humanity's self-image.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Rorty's pragmatic position on knowledge and his rhetorical emphasis on the contingency of our practices and norms of justification are thus meant to foment experiment and change to be undertaken by liberally virtuous citizens. His willingness to bet that such change is likely to be progressive over the long haul stems from his faith in the historical trajectory of the liberal tradition and in the virtuous members of the developed democracies. In his critical assessment of Rorty's dynamic vision of liberal progress, however, Bernard Williams worries that

The fear is that in Rorty's post-Philosophical, literary, liberal utopia, our norms will be too unstable to do their job of creating a moral and epistemic framework in which we can successfully live; as Marx famously assesses the creative destruction of capitalism, “all that is solid melts into air.” Without stable norms of justification, we risk either an interminable, and possibly violent, conflict of views or, as Williams's suggests, boredom and ethical malaise, because it is all “just talk” anyhow.

Albrecht Wellmer's piles on here, arguing that Rorty's endorsement of a “generalized fallibilism” not only undermines our practices of justification but is incoherent in light of his acceptance of Davidson's argument that most of our beliefs must be true. According to Wellmer, Rorty's fallibilism commits him to the proposition “that each single one of our beliefs may turn out to be false, [but] if this were the case, it would also be conceivable that all our beliefs – not all of them at the same time but all of them successively over time – could turn out to be false (or unjustified),” which contradicts Rorty's premise that most of our beliefs are true.Footnote ⁹⁷ Wellmer proceeds to invoke Wittgenstein for the proposition that our linguistic practices rest on “certainties”: assumptions that nobody even cares to state because nobody would think of questioning them. Wellmer writes,

With his invocation of necessary, unchanging “certainties,” Wellmer attempts to “stabilize” inquiry in the face of the alleged justificatory anarchy entailed by Rortyan fallibilism.

Wellmer's argument for the incoherence of Rorty's fallibilism, however, misses its target. Rorty can hold that most of our beliefs are true but still insist that we do not know definitively which ones are or are not. That is enough to sustain his fallibilism because it still enables him to say that, as far as we know, any particular belief might be shown to be false. Wellmer's worry that this entails that all of our beliefs could, over time, prove to be false is exactly the sort of “philosophical doubt” pragmatists dismiss because it has no implications for practice. Rorty replies to Wellmer, “I see Wittgensteinian certainties as assertions that we cannot, at the moment, think of any reason to doubt, and consequently think are unlikely ever to require justification. There are many such assertions, but I do not understand what their existence is supposed to do for ‘the idea of truth.’”Footnote ⁹⁹ Rorty asks, “Why should a fallibilist be less able or willing to justify his beliefs to others than a nonfallibilist?”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Rorty is perfectly aware that we need more or less stable norms for effective inquiry (indeed, for communication to occur at all) but wants to eschew labeling such norms necessarily “true” because of his anti-authoritarianism: such absolute claims tend to unproductively constrain inquiry. While some constraints, at any particular time, are indeed necessary for the practice of justification, we should think of any particular constraint in pragmatic, fallibilist terms, rather than in absolutist terms. Wellmer, in contrast, is trying to leap from the fact that we want stable frameworks of inquiry to the metaphysical conclusion that there are propositions that cannot be questioned because they necessarily true and which, moreover, we can somehow identify (because otherwise his point is empty). While Rorty concedes that his emphasis on the contingency of even our most well-established norms fosters a context of inquiry in which radical challenges to those norms are more likely to emerge, he asserts that his pragmatic emphasis on empirical consequences in light of our current goals limits the extent of actual radicalism.

To come back around, finally, to Putnam's charge of relativism, Rorty rejects it because he does not hold (as no one truly does) that any set of beliefs is as good as any other. Instead, again emphasizing the social nature of justification, he provocatively labels his position “ethnocentric,” which entails “that there is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification which a given society – ours – uses in one or another area of inquiry.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Unfortunately, this is exactly the sort of sentence that gets misinterpreted by critics as suggesting that one can never legitimately criticize the standards of one's epistemic community. After all, if Rorty's instruction is that we should not seek a standard – truth – beyond our community's standards of justification, then we appear to be trapped in them, without any standpoint from which to criticize them. Putnam therefore concludes that Rorty lacks “any meaningful notion of reforming norms and standards.”Footnote ¹⁰²

In making this criticism of the failed reformist aspect of Rorty's project, Putnam refers to another sentence of Rorty's that is a favorite of critics: “[The pragmatist] does think that in the process of playing vocabularies and cultures off against each other, we produce new and better ways of talking and acting – not better by reference to a previously known standard, but just better in the sense that they come to seem clearly better than their predecessors.”Footnote ¹⁰³ For Putnam, this is not good enough, for it again makes a concept – “reform” – seem too dependent on communal consensus, and thus falls prey to relativism. He suggests: “For example, since the community that Rorty speaks of is normally all of Western culture, it could happen that a neofascist tendency wins out, and people cope better in the sense that it comes to seem to them that they are coping better by dealing savagely with those terrible Jews, foreigners, and communists.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Rorty's view is wrong because,

In other words, Putnam does not think that Rorty's attempt to take refuge in ethnocentrism saves him from the charge of relativism; if anything, it is actually an admission of (cultural) relativism.

Denying that he ever suggested that either warrant or truth was a matter of “majority vote” – that is not usually the mechanism by which norms change and progress – Rorty responds again by pointing out that, while he agrees that a majority could be wrong about warrant or reform, it would be so only in the relative judgment of some particular audience applying their historically conditioned standards of justification.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Warrant and reform do not just exist, independent of a community of inquirers. As Jeffrey Stout describes Rorty's position, “The self-reliant inquirer is also inescapably a member of an interpretive community, an invoker of norms involving the notion of rationality, and a person constantly engaged in distinguishing truth from error on a retail basis.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Putnam's bludgeoning use of the phrase “logically independent” obscures this fact, as it seems to suggest that instances of warrant and reform exist as matter of logic, sub specie aeternitas.

Indeed, Putnam's flirtation with such a context-independent God's-eye view is confirmed by his former student, Jennifer Case, who in an article endorsed by Putnam elaborates his position: “If it is the case that whether a change is a reform is logically independent of whether its outcome seems good or bad, then whether a change is a reform is logically independent of whether its outcome seems good or bad to us or, or for that matter, to anyone.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ If this is correct, then Putnam's argument presumes that there can be warranted assertions and reforms of practices that will never be recognized as such by anyone, ever. They are a matter of “independent logic” (known only to God, perhaps?). To Rorty, again, this makes no practical sense, for unless warranted assertions and reforms are recognized, they cannot be taken into account by us as agents who are living a set of social practices. Only if one aspires to take a God's-eye view of things does it even make sense to talk of never-acknowledged warranted assertions or reforms. Rorty is left to conclude that, in spite of the many pragmatic passages in Putnam's work that he admires, Putnam still has yearnings for an “absolute conception of the world,” which is ironically exactly what he rebukes Bernard Williams for seeking.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

This explains why Putnam has such difficulty with Rorty's insistent emphasis on the audience-relativity of warrant and reform. A key part of Rorty's response to Putnam is his clarification of what he means when he suggests that a “reform” is a change in practice that “seems better” than what preceded it. The relevant audience to whom the change “seems better,” Rorty tells us, is “language users whom we can recognize as better versions of ourselves.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ What does “better” mean here? It means something like “more fully liberal,” although the criteria for this are admittedly evolving. Rorty elaborates that we recognize this audience as

This is the best we can do if we want a pragmatic, nonmetaphysical, liberal conception of “reform.” We start from our best, current ideals of liberalism, which inevitably harbor various tensions among them, and we try to imagine what living up to them more fully would entail.

Putnam, however, thinks that Rorty's suggestion that we judge reform by imagining what a hypothetical audience that more fully embodies our currently held ideals would think borders on meaninglessness.Footnote ¹¹² And yet, in the absence of any convincing ahistorical standard of rationality that can definitively identify a reform as truly a reform, what else can we do but tell hopeful, imaginative stories, based on our best, historicist understandings of current practice and our best guesses at what will be successful in the future? Rorty responds to Putnam: “Hegel's historicization of philosophy seems to me important precisely because Hegel grasped the emptiness of Kantian attempts to make ‘Reason’ the name of an ahistorical faculty, and to build ahistorical criteria into the structure of the human mind. His solution was to start replacing transcendental arguments with narratives – stories about how we hook up with our past.”Footnote ¹¹³

This experimental project of reform is admittedly both hopeful and risky. Indeed, the root of the apprehension that many of Rorty's critics have about his views is his bold acknowledgment that there are no guarantees that “progress” will result. Rorty writes:

Critics cannot abide the suggestion that “rational persuasion” could lead to Nazism, and they find the analogy to reversion to Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology demonstrably wrong, because science (“necessary facts”) can be distinguished from morality (“contingent values”).Footnote ¹¹⁵ Yet the hard-headed empiricists who think the analogy fails because it just seems obvious that, while a committed liberal might possibly be talked into becoming a Nazi, it is ridiculous to suggest that modern science could ever be rejected for Aristotelian science, should ask themselves which belief they hold more deeply: that it is wrong to send innocent Jews to the gas chambers, or that nothing is faster than the speed of light. It is simply not clear that our faith in science is more “grounded” than our faith in liberal morality.

Nevertheless, Putnam infers that, for Rorty, calling something a “reform” is mere rhetoric, a pat on the back our successors give to themselves, regardless of whether the change they have embraced is really reform (again, apparently from a God's-eye perspective). Hence, Putnam's “scare scenario” in which the Nazis win and believe they have rightfully reformed all those wrongheaded ideas about equal human rights and such. Like Nagel, Putnam knows that such a development is the farthest thing from what Rorty would desire. Indeed, he concedes that Rorty's rhetoric or, as he also refers to it, Rorty's “emotive” use of “true” and “more rational” springs from good intentions. Putnam even admits that, perhaps, “we will behave better if we become Rortians – we may be more tolerant, less prone to fall for various varieties of religious intolerance and political totalitarianism.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ For Rorty, this is exactly the hope.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Putnam, however, remains skeptical. He continues: “But a fascist could well agree with Rorty at a very abstract level [that what seems like reform is reform].…If our aim is tolerance and the open society, would it not be better to argue for these directly, rather than to hope that these will come as the by-product of a change in our metaphysical picture?”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Indeed, this is a common claim against Rorty: that his pragmatism is actually unpragmatic because his goal – liberal utopia – would be more effectively achieved by, for example, producing metaphysical arguments for the necessity of liberalism. But those who make this claim misunderstand the point of Rorty's liberal utopia: his bet is that it will be more progressive in the long run than a society that continues to use metaphysical rhetoric, even if that rhetoric seems to aim more directly at achieving what we currently recognize as liberal goals.

Rorty versus Revisionist Pragmatism

The final criticism of Rorty that we examine comes from his long-time friend and Princeton religious studies scholar, Jeffrey Stout. Like Gutting, Stout is a particularly perceptive and relatively sympathetic expositor of Rorty's work. Nevertheless, he also cannot abide Rorty's subversion of the notion of objectivity as a goal of inquiry. Against Rorty, Stout aligns himself with contemporary “revisionist” or “new” pragmatists, like Brandom and Ramberg, whom he sees as engaged in a renewed effort “to provide accounts of inquiry that are both recognizably pragmatic in orientation and demonstrably hospitable to the cognitive aspiration to get one's subject matter right.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ While pragmatism always involves “some kind of anthropocentrism” because it accords philosophical priority to human practical activity (as opposed to contemplation of nonhuman metaphysical entities), when it begins to lose sight of the objective dimension of inquiry, as it does on Rorty's account, it becomes “narcissistic.”Footnote ¹²⁰ The revisionists aim to rehabilitate concepts like “truth” and “objectivity” that they see Rorty's pragmatism disparaging by his insistence that “there is nothing to objectivity except intersubjectivity.”Footnote ¹²¹

Stout's critique resembles those of Putnam and McDowell because he insists that the goal of objectivity is unavoidable in meaningful practices of inquiry. Stout, too, presses the importance of the distinction between getting one's subject matter right and achieving agreement with ones peers. He writes:

One hears echoes of G.K. Chesterton's classic takedown of pragmatism: “The pragmatist tells a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute. But precisely one of the things he must think is the Absolute.…Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.”Footnote ¹²³ Needless to say, Rorty disagrees.

Stout knows that he will get the same reply from Rorty that McDowell gets, which Stout summarizes as: “If there is no practical difference between aiming to hold true beliefs about something and aiming to be justified in holding whatever beliefs I hold about that topic, it makes no sense to speak of truth as a goal of inquiry.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Stout concedes that when we seek truth by engaging in inquiry, it involves justifying the beliefs we come to accept as the outcome of inquiry according to our best understanding of our currently held epistemic practices, which means that we necessarily take a first-person, present-tense point of view of those practices. From this point of view, obtaining truth through inquiry, on the one hand, and justification, on the other, do appear to be the same thing: to seek truth is to engage in justification. Nevertheless, Stout insists that

Therefore, Stout concludes that inquirers must distinguish between “two sorts of cognitive propriety: the kind that a person exhibits by believing responsibly, given the epistemic circumstances, and the kind that a belief (or the corresponding assertion) exhibits in getting the subject matter right.”Footnote ¹²⁶ This distinction allows us to say of another that she is “epistemically entitled” to believe something that we take to be false, or that we were, given what we knew at a previous time t, epistemically entitled to hold belief p at t, even though we now know that p is false.

Rorty can respond that “getting the subject matter right,” as well as being able to make the latter statements, still inevitably involves justification according to some group's norms, even if that group is an imagined future entity that has come to an improved understanding of a subject through means that we recognize as epistemically responsible. There is still no norm of truth that is separate from justification; contra Stout, we never leave the first-person, present-tense point of view, even when we are reflecting on the positions of others or on our own previous positions. While conceiving of different beliefs that we do not currently hold is essential for critical scrutiny of our positions and for understanding others, we must not hypostasize some imagined viewpoint as the definitively “objective” one because, again, we do not have criteria for such a God's-eye perspective.

Indeed, we can see why Stout fails to make headway against Rorty in the analogy he presents to show why Rorty is wrong: the case of an Olympic archer. Is the archer trying to hit the target (truth) or merely trying to perform what is recognized by the community of archers as perfect technique (justification)? Certainly she is trying to have perfect technique, but only in order to hit the target. Stout concludes that “achieving the goal involves something more than simply displaying the virtues recognized within the practice – something like actually hitting the target.”Footnote ¹²⁷ The problem with this argument is that we still must judge, by our evolving, community-based epistemic standards what “hitting the target” means. Normally, this is an uncontroversial matter in archery, a matter of Kuhnian “normal discourse,” as it were: it means hitting the bullseye as centrally as one can. But what if we decide to play a game that instead involves putting an arrow in each of the concentric rings on the target? (In darts, for example, there are many games that are not so bullseye-centric). From Rorty's perspective, Stout's bare reference to “hitting the target,” as if it is an obvious referent, smacks of the Myth of the Given. The goal of “hitting the target” is still a matter of the communal language game, even if it is not currently being challenged. Indeed, the problem with Stout's analogy is that, while “hitting the target” is a settled criterion in Olympic archery (for now), there is no settled criterion for “truth.” It is Rorty and Davidson's point that the notion of truth is too abstract and absolute to be pinned down by practices of inquiry that are always evolving and relative. Rorty, of course, further claims that attempts to identify criteria for truth is a potentially dangerous activity politically.

Like other commentators, such as J.B. Schneewind and Neil Gascoigne, Stout also makes much of Rorty's intriguing discussion of “getting things right” in his 2000 “Response to Bjorn Ramberg.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Stout suggests that Rorty makes a “startling” concession to revisionist pragmatism's efforts to preserve the objective dimension of inquiry. Rorty implies this concession when he writes that “some readers may have noticed that Ramberg has persuaded me to abandon two doctrines which I have been preaching for years: that the notion of ‘getting things right’ must be abandoned, and that ‘true of’ and ‘refers to’ are not world-word relations.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Stout contrasts this surprising admission with Rorty's former narcissistic position: “The idea of getting one's subject matter right that Rorty [now] embraces at Ramberg's urging does not boil down to the idea of getting ‘as much intersubjective agreement as possible.’”Footnote ¹³⁰ According to Stout, when Rorty makes the mistake of defining “objectivity as solidarity,” he ironically courts “an especially dangerous form of authoritarianism, because it collapses objective norms into group conformity.”Footnote ¹³¹ In light of Rorty's concessions to Ramberg, however, Stout hopes that he will now be willing to take the next step and follow the revisionist pragmatists in accepting that objective correctness – “answerability to the facts,” in Brandom's idiom – is a norm that is constitutive of inquiry and is distinct from (merely) convincing one's peers.

The first thing to note here is that, if we go back to Rorty's 1985 article, “Solidarity or Objectivity?,” cited by Stout and which is a lightning rod for Rorty criticism, it is clear that Stout's accusation that Rorty's position there implies a problematic “social conformity” falls flat. We can see this by extending Stout's quotation from the article about “getting as much intersubjective agreement as possible.” Rorty writes:

This paragraph hardly presents inquiry as mere social conformity, but rather celebrates an agonistic view of justification where new ideas compete and clash with established beliefs to (hopefully) foment societal progress. By suggesting that we should not think of the desire for objectivity as the “desire to escape the limitations of one's community,” Rorty is not suggesting that we should passively accept current practices, but rather that inquiry should not frame itself as achieving something more than the presentation of new, historically conditioned and contingent options for practice.

Second, Stout and others read far too much into Rorty's “Response to Bjorn Ramberg,” although perhaps some of the blame can properly be laid at Rorty's feet: he humbly professes that Ramberg has helped him see the error of his former ways when he concedes that we do, in fact, “get things right.”Footnote ¹³³ Yet after fessing up to making the alleged errors identified by Ramberg, Rorty quickly asserts that his pragmatism is not changed much by his concession: he stills insists that justification and “answerability to the facts” do not constitute two different norms, that no area of culture is more in touch with reality than any other, and that his “militant anti-authoritarianism” remains intact.Footnote ¹³⁴ Furthermore, there is ample evidence in Rorty's earlier writings – at least since he began his full-throated endorsement of Davidson's approach to epistemology in the early 1980s – that suggests that he always held this “reformed” position urged by Ramberg. Indeed, Rorty writes in several places that we could conceivably continue to use terms such as “representation” and “correspondence” and phrases such as “making true” and “getting things right” as long as we understand them through the Davidsonian-cum-pragmatist lens (as we will see, however, he nevertheless thinks we would likely be better off without this philosophically tainted language). This means understanding that these terms and phrases do not to imply any epistemic, metaphysical relationships between subject and object, or word and world, but instead rest on a web of inferences that are shot through with human purposes.

For example, he wrote in 1988: “To say that you can only be wrong about what you get mostly right is not to say that you can only misdescribe what you have previously identified. It is rather to say that you can only misdescribe what you are also able to describe quite well.”Footnote ¹³⁵ And in response to Hilary Putnam, Rorty wrote in 1993:

Rorty's gloss, of course, is his pragmatic gloss, and this matters because, while it might not have an immediate effect on practice, “it might well, in the long run, make some practical differences. For changes of opinions among philosophical professors, sometimes do, after a time, make a difference to the hopes and fears of nonphilosophers.”Footnote ¹³⁷

Rorty continues after his “concession” to Ramberg to be consistent with these earlier writings, which demonstrates that he has not repented in the way that Stout hopes. In an article first published in 2003, for example, we again find him interpreting “getting things right” in his pragmatist way, albeit after insinuating (again) that we probably would be better off if we stopped using the phrase philosophically all together:

Rorty further elaborates the two dueling interpretations (Realist-metaphysical vs. Davidsonian-pragmatist) of “realist” tropes in a response to Charles Taylor:

The penultimate sentence of this 1994 passage, which lists several true propositions, resembles Rorty's supposedly “newly reformed” views in his “Response to Bjorn Ramberg”:

Lastly, when Rorty examines Brandom's groundbreaking work, Making It Explicit (Harvard University Press, 1994), he finds that Brandom and he are largely in agreement on the objective truth versus justification-as-solidarity issue. He thus disputes Stout's assessment that Brandom is taking an importantly different position. The one sticking point for Rorty, however, is Brandom's continued use of realist-representationalist language, even though Brandom does usually give it the Davidsonian-pragmatist spin. Rorty writes, “[Brandom] agrees with Davidson that interpretation comes first and objectivity later – that the distinction between intersubjective agreement and objective truth is itself one of the devices we use to improve our social practices. But he thinks that Davidsonians should be more tolerant of notions such as ‘representation’ and ‘correspondence to reality.’”Footnote ¹⁴¹ The latter sticking point between Rorty and Brandom concerns which rhetorical strategy is best for advancing pragmatism (and, therefore, liberalism, for although Brandom for the most part refrains from engaging political philosophy, he does acknowledge his general sympathy for Rorty's pragmatic liberalism).Footnote ¹⁴² But, as we have seen, for a Rortyan pragmatist, rhetorical strategy can make a big difference.Footnote ¹⁴³ Rorty worries that Brandom's use of realist tropes will be misinterpreted and used by metaphysical realists to advance an authoritarian conception of knowledge: “[A]ggressive realists like Searle will read ‘getting things right’ in one way, while sympathetic pragmatists like me will read them in another way.…I see Brandom's persistence in using the terms ‘getting right,’ ‘really is,’ and ‘making true’ as tools that will fall into authoritarian hands and be used for reactionary purposes.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Rorty's engagement with Brandom demonstrates the subtlety of the disagreement between revisionist pragmatism and Rorty's pragmatism. For instance, Rorty has followed and endorsed Davidson's conception of communication and knowledge as “triangulation”: “The ultimate course of both objectivity and communication is the triangle that, by relating speaker, interpreter and the world determines the contents of thought and speech.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Rorty's acceptance of this doctrine appears at odds with his anti-authoritarianism because it allows that the nonhuman “world determines the contents of thought and speech.” After all, doesn't Rorty insist, as he famously entitled an early article, that “The World [is] Well Lost”?Footnote ¹⁴⁶ And if the “world” is now allowed to determine our beliefs, Rorty should not feel such revulsion when Brandom writes: “The nonlinguistic facts could be largely what they are, even if our discursive practices were quite different (or entirely absent) for what claims are true does not depend on anyone's claiming of them. But our discursive practices could not be what they are if the nonlinguistic facts were different.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ What is going on here?

Perhaps the most useful way to understand the disagreement between Rorty and the revisionists is to recognize that Rorty is simply more concerned to emphasize the human points of Davidson's triangle relative to the revisionist focus, which emphasizes the “objective” world point (as Rorty realizes, he is more Jamesian, they perhaps more Peircean, in this respect). It is not that on Rorty's view the “world” does not matter – it is a starting assumption for Rorty's Davidsonianism. It is rather that there is nothing to say about the world that is not inextricably communal, and therefore ethical and political. Rorty sums up his Davidsonian epiphany: “[N]obody's language has ever been or ever will be unconstrained by the world, and [pace the Philosophical tradition] nobody will ever be able to be interestingly specific about what these constraints are and how they work.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ This is why Rorty can claim that, assuming our enmeshment in the world's web of causation, there are no constraints on inquiry about this web “save conversational ones.” Where the revisionists think Rorty fails to appreciate the “objective dimension of inquiry,” Rorty worries that the revisionists risk encouraging backsliding into metaphysical realism and, thus, authoritarianism. As Rorty replies to Stout, “What [he] calls narcissism, I call ‘self-reliance.’”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ In Rorty's view, Brandom was on the right pragmatic track in an earlier article where he emphasizes that “all matters of authority or privilege, in particular epistemic authority, are matters of social practice, and not objective matters of fact.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰

By now, it should be clear that Rorty's objection to Brandom's assertion that “what claims are true does not depend on anyone's claiming of them” unpragmatically suggests a structure of objective truths that preexists our discursive practices. Such an idea is too easily read as an incarnation of the Myth of the Given. While Rorty can agree that we will accept new claims as true as they become justified to us, Brandom's rhetoric can be interpreted as suggesting that these truths are waiting there for us to discover them, provided we are rational in our inquiries. Brandom should instead more clearly adopt Rorty's epistemic agnosticism about the “objective world” and agree that, while it is true that our discursive practices could not be what they are if the world was different, we should avoid general references to “nonlinguistic facts” that exist before they become justified to us. Only when claims are justified to us can we assess whether their objects preexisted our discursive practices, like dinosaurs or the Big Bang. This avoids the authoritarianism of the Given and enables inquirers to more freely acknowledge the role that multifarious human purposes play in our practices of inquiry.

Conclusion

Brandom correctly suggests that Rorty understands pragmatism as

This controversial conception of pragmatism, with its emphasis on anti-authoritarianism, is ethically central to Rorty's liberal democratic political theory. With it, he endeavors to subvert the long tradition of the intellectual “Quest for Certainty,” still carried on by contemporary epistemologists and metaphysicians, that he believes to be incompatible with liberalism. Indeed, as we saw in the last two sections, even many contemporary pragmatists, on Rorty's view, fail to fully pursue pragmatism to its anti-authoritarian denouement.

Rorty's pragmatism is an exhortation to liberals to change their self-image, which he believes will bring progressive practical consequences. He succinctly sums up the world-historical change in self-image that he hopes to inspire:

With Rorty's anti-authoritarian pragmatism clearly before us, we can proceed to examine his vision of liberal utopia.