my approach to these issues derives from Richard Rorty's work.
OK, John, researching Rorty gave me something to do today while rooting for Funk at the PGA. There is an enormous amount about him on the Internet, and I copied off quotes that seem relevant and interesting. I was very careful to not quote out of context, and all references are at the bottom.
My major problem with him, of course, is his "anti-Foundationalism," the concept that there is no basis for objective reality. I loved the quotes from this interview on the subject of Academia.
RICHARD RORTY
"The name of the game in moral philosophy is finding principles and then finding counter-examples to the other guy's principles. Pragmatists aren't very big on principles. There isn't much to do in moral philosophy if you're a pragmatist."(1)
Int: Is that why pragmatism has met with such vehement opposition?
Rorty: Not the main reason. It might have had something to do with it......
Int: How do you respond to the recent conservative attacks on the academy?
Rorty: I think that the academic left has made sort of an ass of itself and has given easy targets for the conservatives, but basically I think that the conservatives are just either jealous of the soft life that we professors have or else working for the Republicans and trying to underm~ne the universities the same way they undermined the trade unions. I mean that the universities and colleges are bastions of the left in America, and the closest thing we have to the left is roughly the left wing of the Democratic Party, and if you look at the statistics on what kind of professor votes for what, the humanities and the social science professors always vote overwhelmingly democratic, and obviously the youth that is exposed to courses in social sciences and humanities is going to be gently nudged in a leftward direction.
The Republicans are quite aware of this fact, and they would like to stop it from happening. Any club that will beat the universities is going to look good to them. The more the English departments make fools of themselves by being politically correct, the easier a target the Republicans are going to have.(1)
Int: Is that what you meant by "making asses of themselves"?
Rorty: I think that the English departments have made it possible to have a career teaching English without caring much about literature or knowing much about literature but just producing rather trite, formulaic, politicized readings of this or that text. This makes it an easy target. There's a kind of formulaic leftist rhetoric that's been developed in the wake of Foucault, which permits you to exercise a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion on anything from the phonebook to Proust. It's sort of an obviously easy way to write books, articles, and it produces work of very low intellectual quality. And so, this makes this kind of thing an easy target from the outside. It permits people like Roger Kimball and D'Souza to say these people aren't really scholars, which is true. I think that the use made of Foucault and Derrida in American departments of literature had been, on the whole, unfortunate, but it's not their fault. Nobody's responsible for their followers.(1)
Rorty suggests, that "we see knowledge as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature." (PMN 171) (2)
" For the pragmatist, true sentences are not true because they correspond to reality, and so there is no need to worry what sort of reality, if any, a given sentence corresponds to -no need to worry about what "makes" it true. (just as there is no need to worry, once one has determined what one should do, whether there is something in Reality which makes that act the Right one to perform.) " (3)
" Pragmatism, by contrast, does not erect Science as an idol to fill the place once held by God. It views science as one genre of literature-or, put the other way around, literature and the arts as inquiries, on the same footing as scientific inquiries. Thus it sees ethics as neither more "relative" or "subjective" than scientific theory, nor as needing to be made "scientific."(3)
(1) Interview with Richard Rorty. princeton.edu
(2) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy seop.leeds.ac.uk
(3) Consequences of Pragmatism, publ. University of Minnesota Press, 1982. marxists.org |
