Rorty is dead, but a thinker lives on in his recorded thoughts, and we honor a thinker by thinking his thoughts with a mind that is at once both open and critical, open but not empty or passive. In Chapter Three of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty writes:
It is central to the idea of a liberal society that, in respect to words as opposed to deeds, persuasion as opposed to force, anything goes. This openmindedness should not be fostered because Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake. A liberal society is one which is content to call 'true' whatever the upshot of such encounters turns out to be. That is why a liberal society is badly served by an attempt to supply it with 'philosophical foundations.' For the attempt to supply such foundations presupposes a natural order of topics and arguments which is prior to, and overrides the results of, encounters between old and new vocabularies. (pp. 51-52, italics in original, bolding added.)
I find something right about this passage. In many ways I am an Enlightenment man and a classical liberal. I thrill to Kant's sapere aude! (dare to know) as he invokes it in What is Enlightenment? I am for freedom of expression and open inquiry. I am against indices librorum prohibitorum whether of the Catholic or the Commie variety. I say about myself what Kant said about himself: Ich bin aus Neigung ein Forscher, "I am by inclination an inquirer." As a philosopher, I maintain that nothing is immune from being hauled before the tribunal of reason for interrogation, and that includes the idea that nothing is immune from being hauled before the tribunal of reason for interrogation. So there is a sense in which, in the life of the mind, anything goes, or almost anything.
But what is the point of freedom of expression, unrestrained dialog, and openminded inquiry? Rorty tells us above that openmindedness should be fostered for its own sake. That is a silly thing to say. It would be as silly as if one were to say that a firm adherence to one's convictions, whatever they happen to be, should be fostered for its own sake.
We are openminded not for the sake of being openminded, but because it has instrumental value in the pursuit of truth. Openness of mind and freedom of inquiry are means, not ends. The end is truth. But for Rorty there is no such thing as truth. "A liberal society is one which is content to call 'true' whatever the upshot of such encounters turns out to be." This amounts to saying that there is no truth. For it is easy to see that the "upshot" of a "free and open encounter" in one society may well be different from the "upshot" of such an encounter in another society. The truth, however, is not the sort of thing that can be different for different societies or different epochs or different social classes.
That is just the way truth is. Truth is absolute by its very nature. You cannot say that there is truth and then go on to identify it with some such property as warranted assertibility or rational acceptability or what your colleagues will let you get away with saying. Warranted assertibility is different at different times and places; truth is not. Water is an element was warrantedly assertible by the ancients Greeks; water is HO was warrantedly assertible in the days of Dalton. But neither of these propositions is warrantedly assertible now. If truth were warranted assertibility, one would have to conclude that water has changed it chemical composition — which is absurd.
The PoMo types sneer at this sort of refutation because it is so easy. But this is just a case where simplex sigillum veri. And if Rorty and Co. can't deal with a simple objection, how will they deal with a hard one? Besides, sneering is not refuting.
G.E. Moore's Open Question style of objection suggests itself. You may insist that pleasure is the good, but the question remains open: Is pleasure the good? Similarly, you may posit that truth is warranted assertibility, but it remains an open question whether truth is warranted assertibility. The denial that truth is warranted assertibility is neither a logical contradiction nor an analytic incoherence like 'Bachelors are female.'
Furthermore, there is no contradiction in the idea of truths (true propositions) that are assertible but not warrantedly assertible. The following proposition is assertible: 500 feet below my house there is a piece of rock that has the same shape and weight as Paris Hilton. This might well be true, and it is assertible; but it it not warrantedly assertible. And as I already pointed out, what is warrantedly assertible need not be true. Dalton had warrant for asserting that water is HO, but what he had warrant for asserting was in fact not true.
There are truths that are not warrantedly assertible, and there are warranted assertibles that are not true. So truth cannot be identical to warranted assertibility. Now I would have no objection if Rorty were simply to drop the word 'true.' But that is not what he does, as witness the above passage. He wants it both ways at once. He wants to forward philosophical theses, but without really doing that. He wants to substitute rhetoric for argument but without quite giving up argument. So he ends up giving shoddy arguments, as I hope to show in later posts.
There is also the following consideration, that may be worth developing. It is warrantedly assertible that truth is NOT warrantedly assertible. The warrant is the reasons I have been giving. Therefore, if truth is warranted assertibility, then it is true that truth is not warranted assertibility.
I will say more about Rorty and truth in a subsequent post, but I will end this entry by asking what is particularly liberal about Rorty's view. "A liberal society is one which is content to call 'true' whatever the upshot of such [free and open] encounters turns out to be." But if liberalism is not tied to some notion of Enlightenment, if it does not aim at a displacing of errors, and an arriving at truth, a transcending of partial perspectives and limited horizons, then it is none too clear how Rorty's liberalism differs from a bad conservatism of the sort supported by Wittgenstein's vision of incommensurable language games/forms of life.
If the members of the Muslim Brotherhood decide via "free and open encounters" that the destruction of the Little Satan and the Great Satan are jobs One and Two respectively, then that strike me as none too liberal; but it seems consistent with a pseudo-liberalism of Rortian stripe.