There have been interesting comments from my first two Rorty post. Watching my commenters spare a bit has deepened my understanding.
I am still reading Philosophy as Cultural Politics and read through the following piece at UK Prospect, which I found helpful.
I’d be happy to hear other reading suggestions as well as general musing on the topic.
My sense so far is that way I use the term truth differs significantly from the way philosophers do. I think of truth as correspondence between the map of reality I carry in my head and the experiences I experiencing. I say the map is true when I am experiencing what the map says I should be experiencing.
However, I gather this is far too narrow a definition for philosophers. There seems to be sense in which philosophers want to say that the map is or is not “fundamentally true” and that differs from my simply being able to find my way from point A to point B using said map.
Is this much correct? If so, does this mean I am already a proto-Rortian or am I completely outside of Rorty’s paradigm? Perhaps even opposed to it?
In and all comments are welcome including the comment that this is all a ridiculous waste of time.
12 comments
Comments feed for this article
Wednesday ~ April 13th, 2011 at 9:38 am
Brian McDonald
This two-minute clip from an interview with Rorty might be helpful.
Wednesday ~ April 13th, 2011 at 10:08 am
Jay Jeffers
“My sense so far is that way I use the term truth differs significantly from the way philosophers do. I think of truth as correspondence between the map of reality I carry in my head and the experiences I am experiencing. I say the map is true when I am experiencing what the map says I should be experiencing.”
Prima facie, I would say one thing you share with Rorty is a lack of concern for correspondence with an external world that is what it is regardless of your dealings with it. What strikes me as dissimilar is that you didn’t mention anything about any other people, in your account of truth. It seems like Rorty is big on the community in this regard.
One can never nail all this down in a short summary, but I do wonder whether you’re closer to the mainstream of analytic philosophy or closer to Rorty. Meaning, I wonder what you think of the map in your head. Is it socially constructed, handed down from other people? Is it an innate biological fact? The former is closer to Rorty, the latter only seems to make sense once we’ve agreed that there is an external world we’ve successfully apprehended (like, say, with brain science, which is involved with other kinds of science).
Also, I wonder about what you think of your experiences. Do other people have them too? (this might come across snarky, I don’t mean it to)
I ask because solipsism is one of those things that’s supposed to count as a reductio ad absurdum (so it counts as a land-mine to avoid). The options seem to be between social reality, and a naive realist one (using “naive” colloquially).
….. I mean, when you say things about the economy, is this ultimately a way for you individually to get other people to go along with you, regardless of the content of your pronouncements? Or is it that there is some stubborn external world that you’re describing to economic laypeople like me?
You can take these questions as rhetorical, of course.
Thursday ~ April 14th, 2011 at 11:28 am
Karl Smith
Not socially constructed. What confuses me about Rorty is the emphasis on the social. Why not simply talk about whether the map gets you to the destination regardless of what other people think.
Do other people have experiences. I act as if they do. In some sense its a question that is neither here nor there since I have no way of knowing.
As I would say, imagine the entire world suddely turned into Zombies, how would I know. As far as I can tell I wouldn’t. Therefore, its not a real question
Wednesday ~ April 13th, 2011 at 11:09 am
Greg Ransom
Skip Rorty, read Wittgenstein.
Rorty has not escaped from the philosopical pathologies he shadow boxes against.
Wednesday ~ April 13th, 2011 at 11:45 am
jsalvatier
This is confused. You’re not arguing about philosophy, you’re arguing about word definitions. There are several related notions: 1) a true theory is a useful theory 2) a true theory is a theory which is useful in the vast majority of possible cases 3) a theory is true if most people regard it as true etc.
Once you have described which of these you mean, there is no leftover question about which one is really ‘truth’. This (http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/) is a good discussion of this issue. More generally, the whole A Human’s Guide To Words is excellent on related topics (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human%27s_Guide_to_Words).
Wednesday ~ April 13th, 2011 at 12:00 pm
Ken S
To add more rhetorical questions, how can explaining reality as a social construct account for the observation that some ‘socially constructed’ spaces have wildly different levels of ‘acceptable orneriness’?
For example, the quote “For what counts as an accurate report of the truth is what a community will let you get away with.” sounds pretty appropriate for politics but for science it still rings false to me… do we just point to other social conventions for how this state of affairs came about?
Wednesday ~ April 13th, 2011 at 12:05 pm
NRW
Hey Karl:
If you’re interested in truth in general, and the problems philosophers have found with it, I think Rorty is not the best place to start. Rorty is writing for a very specific audience, the 20th century Western intellectual who is drawn to philosophical thinking but frustrated by its cultural irrelevance and the lack of progress on mainstream philosophical problems like “How do you know you’re not dreaming right now?” If you’re not a member of that audience, I think what Rorty has to offer you is rather limited.
A better way in, I think, would be to read something like Simon Blackburn’s Truth: A Guide. It’s short, general introduction to the modern philosophical literature on truth written by a first class philosopher who tries to do his best to lay out the intellectual landscape without resorting to too much jargon. Rorty gets a relatively full (and fair) treatment, and you get to see his position contrasted against other competing views. It’s a good way to get a feel for the issue and then figure out who you want to read next.
As for your specific comments about how you think about truth, I’d say a couple of things. First, I’d be willing to bet that you don’t just IDENTIFY the truth of a map with its usefulness in getting you around. A map is just a type of model, and as an economist, you know full well that models can be useful for prediction without being true. Ptolemaic astronomy was very good at predicting eclipses despite the fact that it isn’t a correct picture of how the planets are arranged. And economic models can do well at predicting consumer behavior even though we know that the no person approximates the rational actors that figure in the model. In chemistry, models based on the interaction of ideal gases are used to predict the behavior of real-world gasses, etc.
Second, I’d caution you to be skeptical of the thought that you mean something different when you use the word “truth” than philosophers do. When philosophers think about truth, or, better, when philosophers START to think about truth, they almost always start with some very commonsensical notion like “Truth is the feature that the sentence ‘My father was born in 1948′ has if my father was actually born in 1948 and lacks if my father was born in some other year.” It’ s hard to see how your conception of truth could differ in some substantial way from THAT and count as a conception of truth at all.
Thursday ~ April 14th, 2011 at 11:31 am
Karl Smith
Well taken, I look up the Blackburn book.
If philosophers are using the word the same why I am then truth has to depend on some sort of experience, otherwise how would I know what I am even talking about.
I don’t, however, see why it has to depend on a social experience. I can say there is a couch in front of me, go and sit down and then fall to the floor. I would then naturally say “I was wrong to think there was a couch in front of me”
No social aspect but experience is crucial
Thursday ~ April 14th, 2011 at 10:03 pm
NRW
I think Rorty would agree with the spirit of everything you’ve said here, Karl. If someone rings your doorbell, you’re not going to be able to figure out who’s there by talking about it. You gotta answer the door. Rorty doesn’t want to deny anything so obvious as that. When Rorty talks about the social dimension of truth, what he means is that once you’ve answered a question to my satisfaction, and your satisfaction, and to your neighbor’s satisfaction, ad infinitum, there’s no FURTHER point in wondering whether the answer you’ve arrived at is, nonetheless, not really true. Once you’ve got everyone to agree, there’s nothing else to do.
Oh, and about the Blackburn, I should warn you that Blackburn’s book has a strong point of view. He’s up front about it, but he’s not a neutral arbiter trying to show you the way around without expressing a preference. That’s to my taste–I like a writer with an opinion–but it’s definitely a book you have to approach with your intellectual guard up.
Thursday ~ April 14th, 2011 at 11:07 am
Scott Sumner
Yes, I think you are a proto-Rortian. Rorty would argue that it makes no sense to talk about “things as they really are,” in contrast to how we perceive things. All we know about how things really are, is how we perceive them to be (including perceptions using instruments like telescopes.). I think he’d argue that individuals may come to believe things are true when events confirm their mental models, as you say, but that’s not the only way people establish beliefs.
One criticism of Rorty is that people often say, “I believe X is true, even though most people don’t see things that way.” Rorty argues that this may be an implied prediction that over time people will come to regard X as true.
Another way to think about Rorty is that he is sort of arguing against the field of epistemology. He’d say we don’t need to study epistemology, and come up with ground rules for establishing truth (falsifiability, etc), rather we just need to get on with finding truth. Thus epistemology can’t really contribute to science. Scientists use the best arguments they can devise to convince their fellow scientists, and there is nothing more to be said. Either the arguments are convincing, or they aren’t. Philosophers shouldn’t try to referee these disputes.
Many scientific models tend to be regarded as true if they are in some sense useful. Historical models (and some scientific models) may not be testable, but may be regarded as true if they are in some sense coherent. In my research on monetary history I look for coherence, not falsifiability.
Thursday ~ April 14th, 2011 at 10:06 pm
NRW
I think that’s nicely put, Scott.
Thursday ~ April 21st, 2011 at 1:28 am
Rorty, Coherence, and Falsification « Perfect Hedge
[...] Sumner, in the comments section of Karl Smith’s open thread on Richard Rorty: Another way to think about Rorty is [...]