2 of 7

Thus, Crispin Wright's attempt (in his Truth and Objectivity) to distinguish between discourses which require a realist conception of truth (e.g., geology) and those which demand only a non-serious, "minimalist" notion (e.g., the truth about what is funny) is impugned by Rorty for overlooking the "fact" that such distinctions are themselves "just local and transitory historicosociological differences between patterns of justification and blame." Charles Taylor is likewise criticized for clinging to the idea of truth as correspondence to reality. Insofar as Taylor continues to treat "our nonlinguistic causal interaction with the rest of the universe as 'grounding' knowledge rather than just plain helping to cause it," Rorty suggests that he has failed to get out from under the "collapsed circus tent of epistemology—those acres of canvas under which many of our colleagues still thrash aimlessly about."

And so it goes throughout the section. Rorty censures philosophers whose intuitions and projects are fundamentally opposed to his own (Wright, John Searle, Thomas Nagel, John McDowell) and makes explicit the subtler differences that divide him from those to whom he is more sympathetic (Taylor, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, Robert Brandom, Daniel Dennett).

Despite Rorty's contention that the "Truth" essays are wholly critical in character, one can discern in them an implicit proposal regarding how academics should speak about truth and our access to it. (Rorty doesn't think that "nonphilosophers" have a theory of truth, nor does he think they should worry about developing one.) The proposal is "quietist" or "deflationary" about the nature of truth—Rorty refuses to provide anything like an analysis (realist or otherwise) of a property attaching to the sentence p when it is in fact the case that p. The most he thinks we should say about what makes an utterance true involves "disquoting" it (i.e., removing the quotation marks): thus we can say that the sentence "Snow is white" is true just in case snow is white.

The only additional content of "true" that is worth retaining, says Rorty, stems from its honorific and cautionary uses. We employ "true" when we wish to emphasize our commitment to some position ("Of course it's true that dinosaurs roamed the earth long before human beings did!"), sanction some set of other statements ("Everything Clinton said to the grand jury was true"), or caution someone ("But look, it's not clearly true that a low-fat diet is the way to go").

Most of this will be familiar to readers of Rorty. What is new in these essays is Rorty's willingness to admit that our concept of truth is "an absolute notion": relativizing truth to persons, purposes, or cultures, he admits, is "weird" and "pointlessly paradoxical." Rorty thereby recants his old belief that truth is merely "warranted assertibility" or, more notoriously, "truth is what our peers let us get away with saying."

But although "true" is an absolute term, Rorty insists that "the conditions of its application will always be relative," for "we have no criterion of truth other than justification." In other words, the only procedure we have for deciding when to call a statement true involves consulting our extant practices of justification (in science, history, philosophy, everyday situations, etc.). Moreover, these procedures are relative to our current interests and abilities: "'justified for me and not for you' (or 'justified in my culture but not in yours') makes perfect sense." So justification is relative, and justification is all we have to go on in deciding what we'll (for the time being) call "true."

next page... |  2 of 7

share this page